Email Marketing Article From 1996

Here it is ... click to see who the author was/is.

Old-school articles were different, weren't they? Here's an image of the bottom of page one of a twelve-page missive from Don Libey in 2005.

On page three, he discussed the political polarization (caused by economic disruption) that began with Ross Perot and would dominate our discussions in 2026. He missed the jet fighter fluid that would be poured on the topic by Fox News, for nobody is perfect. He argued that people studied individual trees when they needed not just to study the forest but the regional and global issues that influenced the forest. A good analogy for 2005. Imagine if he'd seen the forest fires coming and tried to explain why they would happen? He'd have been mocked (more than he already was for trying to tell you about the future).

Back to the email marketing article.

I've worked with more than three hundred "brands" in my twenty years of consulting. Here's a quiz question for you. How many of those brands did a good job with email marketing, the kind of job that Seth Godin would be proud of?

1. 2 clients.
2. 17 clients.
3. 29 clients.
4. 50 clients.

The answer is (1) ... two clients.

Two!!

The first client had a young female employee who presented her findings to the Executive Team, showing all the profit she generated for her company. As she left the Executive Conference Room, one of the Executives whispered to me "God, what a nerd". 

It's easy to lose faith when you hear those comments. 

I was once asked to speak at a conference - the conference asked me to attend a dinner for Executives attending the conference. One of the CEOs, sitting across the table, said "Why should we listen to you, you are just a nerd? Meanwhile, we run businesses!" The table chuckled. Yeah, ha ha. Funny. I later created a term to define this person. "Lemonhead".

Two years after Seth Godin wrote the article at the start of this post, Management at Eddie Bauer asked him to speak to Leadership. The most used phrase I heard from co-workers after he described his premise of "Permission Marketing" was "we're not going to do that". Of course, Eddie Bauer went bankrupt multiple times since then, but that's a topic for another day. Any vision of the future that goes beyond standardized, routinized, templatized work is one not likely to be embraced. 

There are reasons that nearly every single company scrubs the humanity out of public-facing work.

Garden variety Managers and Analysts don't want to do the additional work because they won't be recognized for the brilliance required to do it and they won't be compensated for their efforts.

Directors and Vice Presidents don't want to do the additional work because if the additional work "doesn't work" they won't be believed/respected the next time they want to implement something important to them.

C-Level Executives and Owners don't want to do the additional work because it doesn't align with their "vision" for the future.

So nobody does the work.

Which means the competitive advantage of "doing the work" has never been greater ... even for a discipline like email marketing that is three decades old.