Tuesday, August 28, 2018

#21 Don't Coddle Lousy Customers. Redline!


Issue #21 - Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Posted by Denny Hatch

Don’t Coddle Lousy Customers. Redline!


117th Street, New York, 10035. Circa 1937



Redlining has been a fact of life in direct marketing for 100 years. For example:

Many years ago, the Book-of-the-Month Club received a phone call from a new member in New York City. The person said she had replied to an introductory New York Times ad offering "5 books for $1" and had heard nothing.

The club's telephone rep asked what ZIP code the caller lived in.

"10035," was the reply.

"Oh, we're not filling orders from that ZIP code."

The result: outraged screams of discrimination by media and consumer action groups.

The policy was based on a ZIP code analysis of customers in inner city neighborhoods where buyers kept the five premium books, never paid the $1 and never ordered additional books.

Best Buy’s Problem


Back in 2003, Best Buy’s CEO Bradbury H. (Brad) Anderson analyzed his customer file and discovered out of the 500 million customer visits a year, 20 percent—or 100 million—were unprofitable.

Imagine! 100 million money-losing customers!

Anderson hired as a consultant Columbia Business School Professor Larry Selden, author of Angel Customers and Demon Customers.


Selden divides customers into "angels" and "devils."

Angels are the desirable customers who buy lotsa stuff, keep it and pay their bills.

Devils are the worst customers who…

• Order 3 party dresses from an upmarket catalog, wear one to a gala and return all three the next day. 

• "… buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.

• “… load up on 'loss leaders'—severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods by selling them on eBay.

• “… research rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge."
— Gary McWilliams, The Wall Street Journal

It was Selden who came up with a revolutionary theory:

A company is not a portfolio of product lines, 
but rather a portfolio of profitable customers.

Duh.

Best Buy carefully analyzes its customer base. It cannot keep these sleaze balls out of retail stores. But it can make life difficult for them, such as a 15% restocking fee for bad actors.

Who Are Your Good Customers?
The marketing 101 formula for good customers is Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM).

The most recent customer who frequently spends the most money with you is your best customer.

Savvy retailers and direct marketers divide customers into 5 quintiles. In Quintile #1 are your best customers. In Quintile #5 are the poorest performers.

Seattle marketing guru Bob Hacker’s advice to his clients:

“Wanna make a profit this quarter? Don’t mail your 5th quintile.”

Takeaway to Consider

• If you don't have a precise list of customers—angels and devils—you don't have a business.

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Word Count: 455

Note to Readers:  
May I send you an alert when each new blog is posted? If so, kindly give me the okay by sending your First Name, Last Name and e-mail to dennyhatch@yahoo.com. I guarantee your personal information will not be shared with anyone at any time for any reason. I look forward to being in touch!

Invitation to Marketers and Direct Marketers: Guest blog posts are welcome. 
If you have a marketing story to tell, case history, concept to propose or a memoir, give a shout. I’ll get right back to you. (Kindly stay within the limit of 500 words.) I am: dennyhatch@yahoo.com • 215-644-9526 (rings on my desk).

You Are Invited to Join the Discussion!




Wednesday, August 22, 2018

#20 All your emails are being stolen and sold all over the world


Posted by Denny Hatch


All your emails are being stolen and sold all over the world



At 10:47 AM on May 16th, long-time reader Stan and I had an email exchange about my use of a Walking-Stick Chair to relieve my lower back pain.

Stan suggested I use a nationwide consortium of physical therapists. At precisely 11:00 a.m. I replied via my Yahoo mail:

          Aaah, Stan…

          Thank you.

          I’d rather spend my money and time on Grey Goose 
          vodka and Viking cruises.

Yahoo read my email message and sent it off to Grey Goose.


Grey Goose sent me the following email 15 minutes later.


How did I feel?

1. Violated.

2. Very angry at Yahoo for stealing the private contents of a customer's email and selling it to an advertiser for cash.

3. Very, very offended that upmarket ($39 a bottle) Bacardi/Grey Goose vodka had entered into a conspiracy with Yahoo to invade a Grey Goose customer's privacy for profit. 

In Issue#2 of this cranky blog I uncovered Verizon/OATH:—a global conspiracy of 451 private corporations that have banded together in a massive hacking, invasion of privacy, and theft ring.

Among them:
AOL – Amazon – Adobe – CNN – Facebook – Google - LinkedIn - Match.com – NBC – Pinterest – Spotify - TripAdvisor - Twitter - Verizon - Washington Post – Yahoo! and 435 others!

These venal bastards steal your e-mails, history of searches and downloads, purchases, trysts, travels, travails and browsing habits—every scintilla of data by and about you, your family, your children, friends, business associates, profession, enemies, even your pets—and sell 'em.

Note OATH's credo below:

          "Our stories and services connect with 1 billion people 
          around the world every day."

Clearly this is the largest international criminal conspiracy in history.



The ever-expanding Verizon-Oath dossier devoted to you contains over 1,000 pages of your most private and professional data in myriad “clouds” and available to anybody on the planet with cash.

WANTED: A Snoop-proof, Spam-proof, Hack-proof Email Service
Eight years ago I proposed that the money-losing U.S. Postal Service could become profitable by creating a private, paid e-mail system worldwide.

If the USPS—with its 275-year reputation for honesty and reliability—announced a paid website for private correspondence, I would sign up in a nanosecond.

If not the USPS, then a private company to create a communications network for business and consumers:

• Dues: $5.95 a year.

• Cost to send the same email to an unlimited number of recipients within the system: 1¢.

• Use the E-ZPASS collection system.

• Cost to receive e-mail within the system: Bupkis. Free.

• Wanna correspond with a member? Join.

• No ads.

• No spam. (Spammers cannot afford the cost.)

• No leaks.

• No hacks.

• Don’t like paying 1¢ per email?
   —Use free Yahoo! AOL, Gmail, etc.
   —Allow your entire life to continue being available to the world.
   —And go on losing 117 hours a year dealing with spam.

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Word Count: 471

Note to Readers:  
May I send you an alert when each new blog is posted? If so, kindly give me the okay by sending your First Name, Last Name and e-mail to dennyhatch@yahoo.com. I guarantee your personal information will not be shared with anyone at any time for any reason. I look forward to being in touch!

Note to Readers:  
May I send you an alert when each new blog is posted? If so, kindly give me the okay by sending your First Name, Last Name and e-mail to dennyhatch@yahoo.com. I guarantee your personal information will not be shared with anyone at any time for any reason. I look forward to being in touch!

Invitation to Marketers and Direct Marketers: Guest blog posts are welcome. 
If you have a marketing story to tell, case history, concept to propose or a memoir, give a shout. I’ll get right back to you. (Kindly stay within the limit of 500 words.) I am: dennyhatch@yahoo.com • 215-644-9526 (rings on my desk).


You Are Invited to Join the Discussion!

Sunday, August 12, 2018

#19 Is Amazon Involved in a 2018 Bitcoin Marketing Scam?


 Issue #19 - Monday, August 13, 2018
                     http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com

Posted by Denny Hatch    

Is Amazon Involved in a 2018 Bitcoin Marketing Scam?

FAKE FOTO: There is no such thing as a bitcoin per se. It is virtual money,
existing only as digital blips in iClouds, servers, and virtual wallets.

I have been collecting bitcoin stories since May 31, 2013 when I saw it in The Wall Street Journal:

"The freewheeling world of virtual currencies is about to get less free. Just this week, prosecutors claimed to have exposed a $6 billion money-laundering ring that allegedly relied on them.
"'Virtual" currencies can be used just like dollars among people who agree to accept them. One big difference is that they aren't backed by a government. Instead, bitcoin enthusiasts say, the currency derives its value from its limited supply and the support of the people using it."
Since then, my private dossier on the Bitcoin totals 91 stories. I did not understand Bitcoins when this nutsy-fagan scheme of digital dough was first introduced. 

I still don’t.
12 Indicted Russian Conspirators Used Bitcoins
On July 13, 2018 Special Counsel Bob Mueller Indicted 12 Ruskie Gov't GRU cyber criminal hackers who tilted the 2016 election to Donald Trump. From the indictment:

45. [a.] The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks… used the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network (“VPN”) account and to lease a server in Malaysia.
That Same Day I Received These Five Bitcoin Offers.











This Is a Classic Pump-'n'-Dump Scam. 
Here's How One of These Things Works: 
1. Find a cockamamie, cheap-o (penny) stock and buy a gazillion shares.

2. Spend a ton of money on a huge (below-the-radar) media campaign (Internet and direct mail, which are secret) to hype (“pump up”) the price of this stock.

3. Poor Greedy, Gullible Bastards (PGGBs) buy like crazy and send the price through the Redwood Forest treetops.

4. Sell ("dump") your low-cost load into the middle of this buying frenzy.

5. You get obscenely rich. PGGBs lose their collective arsses.



Okay, How Is Amazon Involved?


• A Poor Greedy, Gullible Bastard (PGGB) gets 5 bitcoin emails in one day. 

• PGGB does doo-doo diligence by reading through the first 4 emails replete with photos of handsome studs cavorting with bikini-clad dollies lolling on yachts, swilling Lafite Rothschild, surrounded by guarantees of "$13,000 in Exactly 24 hours."

• Still unsure, PGGB comes to the next-to-last email, reads it carefully and then clicks on the final slide in the series:



“HO-LEE SHEE-IT!” PGGB exclaims. “Amazon is behind this! I love Amazon. I spend a lot of money with Amazon! Bezos is the richest man in the world. He’s offering me a chance to get rich too!”

Takeaway to Consider
• If bitcoin is virtual currency, an Amazon ad amidst this promotional blitz bestows legitimacy, a virtual testimonial and tacit endorsement by Amazon and—by association—the high-profile Jeff Bezos himself.

• “Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon.”
   —Peter Lynch, Fidelity’s Magellan Guru, Wizard, Legend

Further Reading for Your Amusement

The 15 Largest Fraud Scandals In History

Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history



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Word Count: 499

Note to Readers:  
May I send you an alert when each new blog is posted? If so, kindly give me the okay by sending your First Name, Last Name and e-mail to dennyhatch@yahoo.com. I guarantee your personal information will not be shared with anyone at any time for any reason. I look forward to being in touch!

Invitation to Marketers and Direct Marketers: Guest blog posts are welcome. 
If you have a marketing story to tell, case history, concept to propose or a memoir, give a shout. I’ll get right back to you. (Kindly stay within the limit of 500 words.) I am: dennyhatch@yahoo.com • 215-644-9526 (rings on my desk).

You Are Invited to Join the Discussion!