The Empty Whitecoat

Soft innovation is nice, big innovation is necessary

A recent report by Yankelovich, the US market researchers, provides the most compelling evidence to date of a consumer backlash to the increasingly interruptive and intrusive practices of marketers. Published in April, 2004, the report contains some very powerful insights into not only what is wrong with marketing but also what it can do to put things right.

I quote:

Consumer resistance to marketing is a growing phenomenon. During 2003, dissatisfaction with the most egregious marketing intrusions and annoyances boiled over. In the period of a few months, the Federal Do-Not-Call Registry was opened, the HIPAA Privacy Rule took effect, the CAN-SPAM act was passed, and the Attorney Generals of New York, Missouri and Virginia undertook widely publicized legal actions against spammers.

But consumer resistance is not confined to spam and telemarketing. Marketing resistance has gone mainstream. Response to all forms of marketing is declining at precipitous rates. The market for products to block, skip or opt out of marketing and advertising is growing rapidly. Some marketers have even begun tapping into the theme of marketing resistance to promote their products.

Marketing is a significant percentage of the cost of doing business for many companies, so the return on marketing investments is coming under intense scrutiny. Yet, clutter, competition and fragmentation have steadily chipped away at the productivity of marketing. In response, marketers have redoubled their efforts, flooding the marketplace with a deluge of more marketing in the hope that some message somewhere will break through to consumers. This creates a marketing-saturated environment that consumers are resisting with increasing sophistication and skill. As a result, marketing resistance has become another major factor in the continuing declines in marketing productivity.

The overall consumer attitude about marketing is not wholly negative. Consumers have long had a love-hate relationship with marketing. And consumers still love great ads. But the negative elements of a marketplace that is increasingly intrusive, pushy, loud and extreme are unwelcome. So, negative attitudes are up substantially notwithstanding continuing positive attitudes. Unsurprisingly, then, the consumer response to much marketing, even traditional marketing, now looks exactly like the response to spam – avoidance.

Marketing resistance is not a desire to stop shopping altogether. Consumers are certainly not going to drop out of the marketplace. But they do want to shop in a different way. Consumers are smarter with more access to technology, information and products than ever before. Busy, time-starved consumers want marketing that shows more respect for their time and attention. Consumers are more interested in experiences, service and authenticity.

Intrusive marketing rides roughshod over these new competencies, needs and expectations. It is harder than ever to differentiate brands. Parity rules in most categories, and not commodity parity but luxury parity in which all brands are able to deliver the highest levels of quality, reliability, convenience, power and performance. This makes good marketing practice much more important. Consumers expect as much quality from the marketing practices of a brand as from the brand itself. Not to mention that marketing practices can be the source of competitive differentiation when brands are indistinguishable on other key
features and attributes.

And the facts?

The overwhelming majority of consumers express a negative opinion about the marketing and advertising they encounter today.

• 60% agree that their opinion of marketing and advertising has become much more negative than it was just a few years ago.
• 61% feel that the amount of marketing and advertising has gotten out of control.
• 70% say they tune out advertising more than they did just a few years ago.

For many consumers, marketing and advertising is a detriment to their quality of life. While it is not a majority of consumers who express this opinion, it is by no means an insubstantial percentage.

• 45% say that the amount of marketing and advertising they are exposed to detracts from their experience of everyday life.
• 46% say that their shopping experiences are less enjoyable because of all the pressure to buy.

These attitudes concern marketing and advertising as a whole. Certainly, spam and telemarketing generate the most negative reactions, but the depth and breadth of concerns extend to all forms of marketing. Indeed, every form of marketing is affected by the broader marketing environment. For example, 53% of consumers say that spam has turned them off to all forms of marketing and advertising

And perhaps most damning:

The fervor with which consumers are resisting marketing suggests that the impact on marketing productivity is considerable.

• 60% describe themselves as a person who tries to resist or avoid being exposed to marketing and advertising.
• 69% say that they are interested in products and services that enable them to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to marketing and advertising.

The report goes on to suggest that there are opportunities for a new marketing as well. This has been perhaps less publicised than the top-line figures. It then recommends four aspects of a new marketing business model, two of which are old, and two are new. These are:

Precision - Talking to the right people.
This seems obvious, but feedback from consumers suggests that despite best efforts, marketing targeting remains so imprecise that it contributes to clutter.
– 52% wish for less marketing and advertising than today; only 7% wish for more.

• Relevance in marketing. Delivering a message that resonates.
Again, this seems obvious, but consumer feedback suggests that relevance is often lacking. Irrelevant messages add to clutter.
– 59% say that most marketing and advertising has very little relevance to me.

• Power for consumers. Putting consumers in control.
This means regaining control of the business by giving up control to consumers. This is counter-intuitive, but consumers now expect to be able to dictate the terms of any transactional relationship. And if they don’t get it, they just exercise the ultimate control – total resistance.
– 53% complain that nothing has changed because consumers are still at the
mercy of marketers and advertisers.

• Reciprocity for consumers. Providing value in all interactions.
This means paying consumers for their time and attention. Consumers want immediate value from the ad or marketing itself, not the promise of value in a product to buy. This value can be information, entertainment or compensation, but something to demonstrate appreciation and respect.
– 61% say that marketers and advertisers don’t treat consumers with respect.

When reading all this, I got to thinking about Free Prize Inside and Seth Godin's recommendation for large organisations to focus on soft innovation, those small things that anyone can achieve to make a big difference for consumers.

I still disagree with Seth. He incorrectly perceives big innovations as being all about product breakthroughs achieved by technology and science. Unfortunately such a view is in danger of blinding us to the opportunities to make breakthrough customer innovation in marketing itself as the Yankelovich survey suggests. For me, these are the fundamental imperatives for marketers today, these are the essential concerns and opportunities we need to be talking about in any organisation, not just the nice, soft innovations at the edges of a dying discipline.

Overseas call centres damage the brand

Research just published reveals that UK companies setting up overseas call centres are losing customers at a rate that actually negates the cost-saving of outsourcing abroad. The following article in Brand Republic describes:

The current use of offshore call centres is damaging the brands of UK companies and hitting profits, according to a new survey.

Industry analysts ContactBabel says one in seven customers who used an offshore centre responded by changing supplier.

The report, "Finding the balance: the effect of offshore customer contact on profit and brand", claims that UK businesses are using the offshore call centre industry in a cost-obsessed and unimaginative way that is severely hurting their brands.

The report, which analysed a survey of 1,008 UK adults in February 2004, found that 14.2% of the UK public changed their supplier as a result of using an offshore contact centre.

Out of those who personally experienced offshore customer contact, 74% said they felt more negatively towards the company than before. UK telecoms and insurance companies experienced the greatest levels of offshore-related customer resentment, with Scottish consumers the most likely Britons to change supplier because of an offshore service.

The survey also found that those who experienced offshore contact were also four-and-a-half times more likely to change their supplier than customers who had no direct experience of offshoring.

ContactBabel said that a typical high street bank would save £9.26m a year in operating costs by replacing 1,000 UK agents with the same number in India. However, if only an extra 0.343% of customers defected in protest, the bank's revenues would be reduced by the same amount. Last year, 1.09% of UK banking customers changed banks as a direct result of customer service offshoring.

As I stated in a previous blog, it seems that many businesses today view their customer interactions as a COST TO BE REDUCED rather than as a potential investment in service, dialogue and learning. By automating customer interactions or outsourcing them overseas for example, many companies are at risk of commoditising one of their most precious future innovation assets: the opportunity to learn from and create value with their customers. In most cases such cost-focused initiatives will fail to deliver lasting value. Why? Because organisations use them as quick-fixes instead of addressing their more deep-seated underlying problems - i.e. a lack of customer knowledge and a limited market orientation...

Free Prize Inside: Semi-Skimmed

I got my copy of Free Prize Inside from Amazon this morning (a trip to the cardboard recycling unit now required), but i later discovered that the Free Prize Inside was ironically what non-purple cows are very famous for producing ... yes, Milk.

Before I could get to the insides of the packaging, my wife (who is normally bright though not always awake in the mornings, the other way round in the evenings) emptied the contents into a cereal bowl and then doused the free prize in an icy splash of chilled semi-skimmed cow-juice.

So, if anyone can tell me whether pages 78-102 are really important then I may buy another copy, otherwise I shall stick (literally) with my now "semi-skimmed" free prize inside.....

What non-marketers think of marketers

Susan Baker, a senior marketing lecturer at Cranfield, undertook some insightful research a couple of years ago that captures the attitudes of senior non-marketing managers to marketing practitioners.

The results confirmed certain traditional stereotypes of marketers as "unaccountable, untouchable, expensive and slippery" as Malcom McDonald, Susan's former colleague, reports in a paper, "Marketing Malpractice and the Future of Marketing".

Susan's research is summarised in the chart below and makes fascinating reading:

I particularly like "Golden Child", "Lunch", "Jargon", "Mud doesn't stick" and "Costs"! What an indictment! All that is missing there is "ponytail". At least Seth needn't worry about that!

Death by Process

In my current contracting role, I thought I’d keep a mental check of the number of times I heard the word “Process” this week. Mainly because during the week before, I began to notice that almost every conversation contained the word, those magic seven letters that seem to epitomise the modern organisation and the way it designs and delivers well, almost everything…

(It’s funny how even thinking about a potential blog can start to control your own actions and behaviour. I deliberately tried to avoid using the term myself, only to succumb wretchedly. Obviously, the process I had developed to avoid the use of the word had failed me!)

Anyway, after the first three days, I lost count of the mentions of the magic word, although I had reached around 110. But never mind. My point had been proved. My empirical pre-blog analysis was complete. I had stumbled on the most common blame-taker of a multitude of different organisational problems, be it a missed deadline, a defecting customer, a service breakdown, a relationship fall-out, a broken coffee machine … they were all because of a failure of P-R-O-C-E-S-S.

But even better, I observed that the most frequently proposed solution to all these problems was, "Fix the P-R-O-C-E-S-S", e.g. “we need to improve the process” or “let’s meet to review the process” or “what went wrong with the process” or “yep, the process failed again” etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum…

(In fact, I am sure I even began hearing it in my sleep, like some whispered Buddhist chant in the middle of the night, though it could have been my baby son, Tom, working his way through his early morning milk-cry-wind-poo process!).

But then I stumbled on the second aspect of my unscientific examination of the process proselytizers. Looking deeper into the preponderance of process talk, I discovered that the proponents of process were often all subscribers to a common toolkit ….. and that is, wait for it, the Excel spreadsheet! ... It, more than any other software application was like a god to the harbingers of the "how-to-do-it properly". Those pastel-coloured cell columns, those sexy macro buttons just desperate to be pressed, those dynamically adjusting formulas inviting you in to play and dabble, those connected coloured boxes……….! ... Put them all together and we are in Analysis, Planning, Process and Control Nirvana, a veritable Row regatta and Column carnival of multiplying Cells! An orgiastic organigram of organised outputs…, yeah baby!

OK, I exaggerate. Processes are often important. They help us to understand order and sequence and input and timing and feedback. But my point is that a process on its own is nothing. It is an empty vessel for change. Why? Because processes are no substitute for frequent dialogue, for regular conversation, for getting to know your fellow colleagues, their hopes, issues, concerns. For warm, cuddly relationships.

But sadly, our “work” tools such as Excel, Powerpoint, and email can often act as obstacles to social interaction and dialogue. Whats' more, the more functionality put into them, the more desk-bound we become, whilst supposedly becoming more productive. The more they are used in isolation, the more they inhibit the ability of organisations to develop a shared framework of cultural meaning and understanding.

For example, when was the last time you heard any of the three words, “inspiration”, “imagination” or “intuition” during the working day.. if you haven’t, it is because your processes have become part of the problem not the solution. You have a dependence on process and the tools of technical control (and often manipulation). You are stifling innovation, knowledge-sharing and creativity. Your process-dependence is sidelining the corporate imagination, is leading to a lack of inspiration and experimentation, is breeding a seller-centric mindset and is giving rise to me-too, incremental change. In other words, you are suffering from a slow death by process…

Student debt

When I was an undergraduate student two decades ago, the only marketing targeted to my low income, three year, cheese-on-toast "survival" lifestyle was a third off UK rail travel and a free £10 when I opened a bank account in my fresher year. Nowadays, students are "big business" for marketers as the following upcoming Student Marketing conference testifies:

Marketing to Students, 29 June 2004

Students are recognised as being extremely important to brands. With over 2 million students in the UK, this market is worth £13 billion of spending power per annum.

The ongoing rapid development of this group means creating innovative communication strategies and forecasting trends to keep up with new generations of students becomes increasingly vital. The changes get ever faster and often more radical. Generating brand loyalty at this stage is paramount to influencing their future spend.

Marketing to Students aims to provide you with an insight into the current make-up of the student market and how to tackle it. The conference will help you understand the diversity of personas produced by a rapidly evolving student market, and how to make best use of marketing practices to target this complex group.

Is student marketing a case of conversion or conquest? Find out through up-to-the-minute research, practical advice, student opinion and case studies of successful student marketing campaigns.

Then the following article caught my eye in today's Guardian,

Student debt up by 10%, says survey

Student debt rose by 10% last year, putting the average university graduate £12,069 in the red, according to a new survey out today. Barclays Bank said graduate debts had increased by nearly 500% since it began its annual survey in 1994 when students leaving university owed an average of just £2,212 each.

The bank warned that if these trends continued, students could be graduating with debts as high as £33,708 after a three-year degree by 2010, taking into account the government's plans to start charging variable tuition fees of up to £3,000 a year from 2006.

The longer term effect would be that youngsters would be saddled with debt for longer and would lose out in other ways by being unable to get on to the property ladder or start paying into a pension until much later in life, Barclays said.

Almost half the students in the survey said they were worried about how they would pay their debts back, to the Student Loans Company, banks and credit cards, as well as to their parents.

"For the majority, life choices, such as buying a house, getting a mortgage, getting married or even contemplating trying to start saving, will remain a pipe dream until they have got on top of the huge millstone of debt from their student years."

In the red

· Average student debt after graduation:

1994 £2,212

2003 £12,069

2010 £33,708 (projected)

· Proportion of graduates who owe money to:

Student Loans Co 86%

Banks 64%

Credit cards 53%

Parents 29%

(2003 figures)

I wonder if by chance, the two are somehow related?!

Sumantra Ghoshal and the failure of management theory

Sumantra Ghoshal, an eminent London Business School professor tragically passed away at the early age of 55 last month. For many years, he had been working on a project which fundamentally questioned academia's role in the public's loss of trust in corporations and managers. He argued that business schools themselves must take some of the blame for their failure to challenge established management theories. Simon Caulkin in the Observer takes up the story of a man driven to change the face of business education:

London Business School Professor Sumantra Ghoshal was working on a project which took issue with just about everything currently being done in management - including and especially the role of business academics.

Ghoshal's challenge can't be shrugged off as revolutionary ideology or a woolly idealism. Originally a physicist and a genuine management heavyweight, he was a meticulous researcher who never stopped observing and questioning why managers and companies acted as they did. Why, he wanted to know, were managers so busy shooting themselves in the foot, behaving in ways that wrecked their own legitimacy and that of their companies?

Why, instead of nurturing their organisations as engines of progress, were they turning them into vehicles of exploitation and coercion, apeing markets, creating monopolies, ripping off customers and forcing employees to work ever harder while their top managers helped themselves to truly breathtaking quantities of pay?

Reluctantly, Ghoshal had come to the conclusion that the culprit was none other than the academy itself: 'We - as business school faculty - need to own up to our own role in creating Enrons,' he wrote in one of his last pieces. 'It is our theories and ideas that have done much to strengthen the management practices we are all so loudly condemning.'

Recent company excesses, Ghoshal argued, had their roots in ideas developed in business schools over the past 30 years. If managers were seeking ever-more inventive ways of boosting share prices, paying themselves over the odds for doing so and offloading the costs on to society, they were just doing what business-school courses on strategy, transaction cost economics and agency theory had taught them.

Neither was it surprising that policy-makers framed their responses in the same destructive terms. Corporate governance prescriptions are based on agency theory, for instance, with no shred of evidence that they will improve outcomes.

How did the business schools come to create today's management Frankenstein? Ghoshal traced it back to the unspoken academic project to make business studies 'respectable' by removing the subjectivity of analysing company behaviour in terms of human choices and actions, instead looking for explanations in impersonal patterns and laws - a kind of business physics. (Rationalist objectivity rules again - CL)

The pretension to science has far-reaching consequences. By definition, it excludes moral or ethical dimensions from management since they are about intentions which cannot be modelled or quantified. By the same token, it can only admit strictly economic motivations, precisely because they can be quantified. Establishing shareholder value as the one true end of management allows all the complex variables that go into corporate life to be reduced to a neat set of equations.

But in any case, trying to make human organisations fit the causal logic of physics is an egregious error. The laws of physics are blind; humans and their organisations have intentions and choices and employ strategy - one step back, two steps forward - that aren't available in the natural sciences. It not only doesn't fit with what happens in practice; it's wrong even in theory.

There's a final savage twist to the infernal circle in which academics and managers find themselves entwined. Social scientists carry an even greater social and moral responsibility than their colleagues in the physical sciences, argued Ghoshal. If in physics you theorise that a brick dropped off a tall building could fall upwards, you'd get some funny looks - but it wouldn't affect the trajectory of the brick.

In the social sciences on the other hand, if enough people believe it, a 'wrong' theory can become 'right' - exactly what has happened in management. Thus, managers who treat people as opportunistic chancers encourage opportunism that justifies ever tighter controls. Governance that assumes managers can't be trusted to maximise shareholder value without hefty incentives, breeds managers who require huge stock options. Strategy based on the idea that maximising profits involves a battle for value with employees, partners and society generates corporate monsters such as Enron which do in fact distort competition and eventually destroy themselves.

When he died, Ghoshal was challenging academic colleagues not only to stop creating Enrons but to start constructing positive and realistic theories that would be the building blocks for a better corporate world

One of the final things Ghoshal wrote was,

If [business academics] really wish to reinstitute ethical or moral concerns in the practice of management, we have first to reinstitute them in management theory.

Let's hope Sumantra's work and legacy inspires many to do just that....

Defining reverse market orientation through brand components

Picking up on my earlier blog about reverse market experiments, it is possible to define reverse market brands according to four components: purpose, values, alignment and architecture:

Purpose
Reverse market organisations act as a customer consultant and market specialist through an advocacy and support role. They seek to optimise their customer’s interests and personal productivity by designing market value-exchanges that are largely initiated and controlled by customers and which are driven by deep levels of customer commitment, involvement, transparency and brand trust. In effect, reverse market organisations perform a trusted agent role by acting for and on behalf of buyers, by maximising their benefits, protecting their interests (such as personal information) and minimising their risk and uncertainty when dealing with the market.

Values
Reverse market brands incorporate and display empowering humanistic and relationship-centric values that are aligned with the organisation’s ability to supply and resolve new intangible drivers of customer value such as attention, knowledge, privacy, time and access. Importantly, they must have an explicit and consistent brand promise incorporating elements relating to trust, motivation, enthusiasm, chemistry and confidentiality and that requires them to find different ways of going to market. Such a promise is, therefore, realised through the nature and qualities of its customer and other stakeholder relationships.

Alignment
Reverse market brands place particular importance on their customer relationships by prioritising the needs, wants and resources of individual customers and by enabling them to gain maximum value from their transactions and relationships with multiple sellers. Reverse market orientation is, therefore, a response to empowered customer behaviour and customer-controlled market exchanges as customers become knowledge partners and active agents in value-creation and value-sharing. Even Kotler (in Marketing Moves) anticipates a number of changes in the alignment and emphasis of marketing as a result of this shift. He argues that there will be a gradual reversal of product design, pricing, advertising promotions, distribution and segmentation practices (from “push” to “pull”); the sum effect of which will be to contextualise and personalise market exchanges.

Brand alignment in these circumstances differs from a traditional market orientation which is often directed towards improving the productivity and profitability of the firm, despite claiming the fundamental goal of satisfying the needs and wants of customers.

Architecture
Reverse market organisations act as buyer-seller intermediaries or “go-between service providers”. They mediate across multiple channels by orchestrating customer value networks consisting of multiple online and offline suppliers and partners. Their market position departs from tradition where individual product and service brands compete to offer part-solutions to customer need sets. Reverse market value networks subsume partner brands into a meta-brand architecture that enables people to make free and informed choices about the product/service brands that meet their particular needs. In this way, the reverse market brand is able to shape markets and provide a “positive context” of choice and action.

Future of reverse markets

Developing a reverse market orientation is just one response to the vulnerabilities of brands in the face of rising consumer empowerment and growing transparency in firm-customer relationships. Whether this strategy will replace traditional forms of market exchange remains to be seen. Also, it must be acknowledged that although most customers may now possess greater knowledge about firms and the relative value of their products, some are more interested, motivated, and prepared to take advantage of it than others. Also, many companies face competitive situations, operating conditions or customer characteristics that preclude a reverse market orientation. Indeed, a reverse market orientation may be in direct conflict with a traditional marketing and customer orientation. Therefore, its introduction in any single business is likely to be gradual and over the long-term.

However, I argue that a new competitive landscape of reverse market brands offers a market scenario for change in traditional firm-centric brand management. If so, developing a reverse market orientation could provide brand managers with an important means to respond to their critics and address their brand's vulnerabilities.

Dr Johnnie's Seth Clinic

The rebadged Johnnie Moore blogs on the rising tide of Seth worship, in which he concentrates more Seth puns per 1000 pixels ever attempted:

Time was, people might indulge in Seth in the privacy of their homes, and find this satisfying and productive and that was enough. Gradually, though, the need for more and more gratuitous Seth seems to grow and before you know it, people are at it everywhere, in public!

The addiction starts all too easily. At first, Seth is just something you hear about other people doing. Oh dear, I don't fancy that, you think. But over time, things change and slowly you become aware of a longing to find out what having Seth is really like. You start asking questions, perhaps pretending to ask on behalf of a friend to try to distance yourself. But sooner or later you realise... you must try Seth myself.

Now I realise that the world has gone Seth mad. Whilst this is no doubt a cause of considerable pleasure (especially to Seth) I'm increasingly concerned about the spread of Sethually Transmitted Infections.

These are usually heralded by garish colours which stand out painfully on your private bookshelf. Lately, they've mutated so that they can pass electronically as well. As it takes hold, your vocabulary gets taken over and in a weird riff on Tourette's Syndrome you start bluring out words like "Purple Cow" in the middle of polite conversation.

Surely, Johnnie is at risk of fanning the flames of Seth's fame even further? (As In fact I am by blogging about it).

But for me, I am in Seth-denial and will be abstaining for at least a week, (well, until my copy of Free Prize Inside arrives from Amazon that is...)

In the meantime, why dont we invent a new version of Buzzword Bingo, perhaps called Dr Johnnie's Seth Clinic . Used in the usual Buzzword Bingo fashion around the marketing meeting table and also in the brand and advertising blogosphere, the objective of the Seth Clinic is to guard against the rising consequence of bad Seth,. Here's an example appointment card:

The true cost of direct mail: Acts of Advertising principle wanted

A while back, Tim Strafford-Taylor compiled some figures about the amount of supposedly targeted direct mail he had received from financial services companies in a single year (in the UK). His analysis, in which he extrapolates his personal figures to a national UK level, made interesting and illuminating reading and I repeat it here once again ....

For some reason this time last year I decided to start keeping all the “targeted offers” that came through my door from financial services organisations. Today I collected the results (how sad is that)....

Not sure how “average” I am, ... and not sure how many hit the bin before I got to them, so not altogether representative perhaps, but here goes anyway......

Total Weight: 700g (3lb 12oz)
Total Number: 62
No. to me: 42
Occupier / Joint: 6
No. to my wife: 14
No. of institutions:24

No. of institutions whose products we already have:6
Most persistent - exisiting Product: Lloyds TSB (9 offers), closely followed by Direct Line (6)
Most persistent - no exisiting Product: MBNA (8 offers), then Capital One (4)
Sales: 0

How representative is this? Have I got off lightly?

If we extrapolate these figures ...

Population of UK aged 15 – 64
M 19,803,478 * 62 = 831,746,076
F 19,381,734 * 16 = 271,344,276
= Total Mails 1,103,090,352
= 189,940,993.2 kg or 189,940 tonnes of financial services targeted postal offers each year in the UK. Even if you take a small portion of this, it's still one hell of a waste isn't it?

I returned all to “Sender”.....

If anything, Tim's figures are probably on the low side. But nevertheless, to develop his analysis further, I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to examine the financial cost of producing and printing all this mail.

So say a total of 1 billion items were mailed in this year at an average cost of £1 per item - including postage, print and creative.

This makes a total expenditure on Financial services DM activity of £1 billion. Not to mention the cost of handling all this mail through the UK's overstretched and overburdened Royal Mail service - it must be a double-edged sword for them... (Incidentally, why not surcharge the biggest mailers with an environmental tax? Currently, Royal Mail incentivises them to send more through especially negotiated discounts ...!)

Anyway, it turns out that the cost of sending financial services direct mail in the UK is actually greater than the individual GDP of the world's poorest 42 countries. These include: Swaziland, Congo, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Lesotho and Burundi ..

Given this, I wonder what it would take for one FS provider to quit its direct mail programme or at least scale it back considerably in order to divert funds to a more responsible cause (such as alleviating problems in these countries or an environmental charity). Surely the positive publicity created would lead to greater sales and better customer relationships?!

This potential for responsible change connects to a recent article in Ad Age blogged on the Beyond Branding blog by Chris Macrae, "Save the Brand". In it, Gary Ruskin (executive director of Comercial Alert) writes,

"This country is hungry for acts of heroism and principle in the advertising arena. If advertisers want to stand out from the noise, then stop the commercial trespassing. Make it known that you respect us, and our civic institutions, children, noncommercial culture, public health and public spaces. Then act accordingly. This would make advertising more welcome and probably more effective too. "

If individual advertisers took a whole-systems view, they could not only see the true cost of advertising excess but also new opportunities for them to make a statement and do something about it... but who will be the first organisation and brand to do this? It only takes one...