Button pressing baloney

Alan Mitchell at the blog Right Side Up writes an excellent piece about the fallacies and misplaced assumptions held by direct marketers and their claim to have discovered the "holy grail" of consumer data:

.... the direct marketing industry has a big problem. A very big problem which lies deep in the unstated assumptions by which the industry currently operates.

Here are three of these assumptions.

First, that good marketing is about effective messaging: if only we can find the right message – the right stimulus – we can be assured of the right response. Thus when CACI talks about pressing the right consumer buttons it is treating ‘the consumer’ – a living, breathing human being with his or her own purposes, priorities and intentions – as if ‘it’ was a non-sentient automaton that, if you can press the right buttons, you can get to do what you want it to do.

The second assumption follows from the first one: to discover the right buttons and how to press them you need more, better data. So increased marketing effectiveness depends on gathering ever more data and mining and analysing it in ever more sophisticated ways. The more you know about ‘the consumer’ the more effective your button-pressing: i.e. the greater your influence and control.

A third assumption is that this consumer data is a natural resource like fish in the sea: there to be harvested and used by anyone who has the investment and technology to do so (subject to the laws of the land). Since the only entities capable of making these investments are companies, direct marketing naturally revolves around helping companies harvest as much as possible data from consumers, and then to use it as efficiently and effectively as possible to ‘press their buttons’ and get them to do what companies want them to do.

Read the whole piece here. Great stuff..

Comments

[Michael Wagner]

Thanks for directing us to Mitchell's posting - good stuff indeed.

It seems to me that marketers in general and now direct marketers in particular seem to view people like vending machines. Put the right coin in and you get to push whatever button you want to push.

Good to see you posting!