More Questions

Lots of feedback these past two weeks.

• "Kevin, how can you defend mailing fewer catalogs or no catalogs at all when each incremental contact has intangible benefits that cannot be easily quantified by response and profit? How can you possibly know how much harm you are doing long-term by cutting out print?"

Yeah, I hear that often ... I've heard it more often in the past week. The question almost always surfaces from 60+ year old professionals and/or paper/agency professionals.

Let's start here. This is a recent Apple commercial on television. Tell me what the intangible benefit of the commercial is ... I'll wait while you watch it.

You've had since 2008 to decide if you are in the iOS camp or if you are in the Android camp. Demonstrating that iOS is good at AI is pointless ... you either are in the iOS camp and you already use Siri or you are in the Android camp. How many Android users see this commercial on linear television (a medium dominated by 50+ year olds at ever-decreasing rates) and say "That's it, that's the thing that causes me to change!" How many?

You can make a strong argument that the commercial series will not increase sales. Which means the commercial falls into the "intangible benefits" category. Professionals use the term "intangible benefits" to defend a craft that appears unprofitable via most metrics.

None of us know if we are doing long-term damage by cutting out a marketing channel. Heck, we could just as easily turn that argument around and ask the following question:

• "How much long-term damage are we doing to a brand by maintaining a marketing channel with poor ROI when we could/should reallocate those funds to modern marketing channels that attract a different audience?"

In other words, what are the long-term intangible benefits of modernizing marketing efforts?

Look, I know it is painful to spend your entire career doing something you love, only to have that craft lose effectiveness at the very time the paper/printing community decides to charge more and constrain supply, accelerating the demise.  

I have a friend who is a sports writer ... not many people want to pay to read sports content anymore. He provides considerable intangible benefits via his experience and perspective, but the customer does not value those benefits ... they'd rather hear a 23 year old offer less-informed opinions on a podcast. Hence, the intangible benefits have no value.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the long-term perspective of not having catalogs anymore. It's an interesting topic, one many readers will have to grapple with.