An article in Circulation Management (5/08, p. 12) states: “Your subscribers should be complaining about their subscription price. If they’re not, then you’re not charging enough.”

I get the logic of this: if your customers accept your pricing too readily, it indicates that they would be willing to pay more — and therefore, you should price your product or service accordingly.

But I’m not sure I agree with it, because it sounds like making your prices so high that customers find them a burden, and are unhappy paying them, is a good idea.

Do we really want our customers complaining about our prices? Should we in fact always charge the maximum price we can get away with for everything we sell?

Internet marketer Fred Gleeck has a rule for pricing information products: the price should be low enough that if you multiply it by 10, the product would still be worth buying at that multiple.

Therefore, a product with a value of $1,000 should cost no more than $100.

I’m more comfortable with Fred’s pricing guideline than Circulation Management’s advice on pricing so high that customers complain.

Fred’s rule ensures that customers always get more than their money’s worth.

Circulation Management’s rule ensures that they barely or rarely get their money’s worth.

Which do you think is better?

In today’s issue of BtoB (5/5/08, p. 24), American Business Media — an association for business publishers — ran a full-page ad with this headline:

“In the Harsh Conditions of the Business World, the Neophyte Quickly Learns There is No Camouflage for Lack of Knowledge.”

I wish it were true, but it seems to me that in direct marketing, lack of knowledge is not much of an impediment for aspiring executives today.

Every day, I hear from neophyte direct marketers who, it is revealed within the first 2 minutes of our phone conversation, are totally lacking in any knowledge of direct marketing fundamentals.

For example, one B2B marcom manager I talked to didn’t know what a list broker is or what I meant by a list “select.” Another had never heard of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary).

Yet they have managed to rise to relatively high levels, which means either that the BOSS doen’t care that the employee is ignorant of DM fundamentals — or (shudder) that the boss doesn’t know them, either.

Even worse: many of these relative DM neophytes express little curiosity about or interest in learning the rules of direct marketing — even those that are actively using it.

They often hint to me that the Internet has changed all the rules (David Meerman Scott has written a book to that effect, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”) — and therefore things like statistical test validity, A/B splits, response rates, sales leads, and copywriting no longer matter or apply.

Are they right? Wrong? Or does the answer lie somewhere in the middle?

According to an article in the Daily News (4/28/08, p. 8), the two Democratic front runners have spent a record $110 million on TV commercials — $70 million for Obama and $40 million for Hillary.

I know next to nothing about political advertising, but it seems to me these ads can influence voters in 3 different ways:

1–Give the candidate more air time — so he or she is always on the voter’s mind.

2–Present the candidate’s views — so that voters who support those views will vote for him or her.

3–Communicate the candidate’s personality and values — to make voters like him or her.

Do the TV commercials for Obama and Hillary have these or any other effect on you?

Or do you form your opinions of the candidates based on input from other sources — and if so, which?

In an article in DM News, Tom Rapses, a creative director, divides marketing into two separate categories:

1. Old-school response marketing (although Rapsas does not use the term, this is often referred to as “interruption marketing” because it intrudes into other activities such as watching TV or sorting your mail).

2. “Self-service” marketing — including word of mouth advertising, blogging, podcasts, and social networking sites such as Facebook.

“Self-service marketing is all about putting content where people will find it,” writes Rapsas. “It makes sense to go where the customers are.”

On the surface, the notion of putting content where the customers are looking for it — instead of forcing it upon them when they AREN’T in search mode — seems unbeatable.

However, if it works so well, why is so much more money spent on magazine, newspaper, TV, and radio advertising — which are intrusive — rather than on Yellow Pages ads, which once were the primary medium for self-service marketing?

Rapas suggests that you need multiple channels — a combination of traditional direct response with non-traditional self-service marketing — to capture more attention, traffic, leads, and sales.

Do you agree that both old-school direct response and new school interactive marketing have their place?

Or do you think the continued use of intrusion marketing in the 21st century makes one a dinosaur?

Source: DM News, 4/21/08, p. 10.

“False bonding” refers to advertising that seeks to create a bond with the prospect, but does so in an illogical or insincere — and therefore ineffective — way.

A good example is the recent radio spot for Geico offering homeowner’s insurance to people who rent.

It begins (and I am paraphrasing): “We think renters are cool! Why? Maybe it’s all that cool stuff you own….”

The copy then suggests you need to insure your cool possessions with a Geico homeowner policy even if you rent instead of own.

The insincere notion is that “We think renters are cool!” The illogical notion is that renters own stuff that’s cooler than what homeowners own.

Think of the differences between renters and owners. There are many. But does the word “cool” pop into your mind? I didn’t think so.

And it’s stupid to say renters are cool because they own “cool stuff.” They mostly own the same stuff that homeowners do. What renter-specific possession is “cool”?

I would have taken a different tact: “As a renter, you own a lot of valuable stuff. But if it’s stolen or destroyed, who would pay for it? Not your landlord! That’s why you as a tenant need ‘renter’s insurance’ just like homeowners need ‘homeowner’s insurance.'”

Geico’s “cool renters” radio spot is yet another example of how advertising built around an incorrect premise is doomed to fall flat.

Copy has to make logical sense, so readers may be a bit confused by the direct mail promo I received today from Ode magazine.

The order card gives two choices. You can select either “payment enclosed” or “bill me.”

But in all-cap red letters, the copy says “DON’T SEND MONEY.”

If I am not supposed to send money, why are they telling me I can enclose payment?

I think what they MEANT to say was something like “You need not send money now. We’ll bill you later, if you like.”

Right?

Or do you see absolutely no disconnect between “payment enclosed” and “don’t send money”?

“Spelling is overrated,” said a caller to my favorite NYC morning radio show today. “As long as you get the point across, who cares how it’s spelled?”

The host replied, “Because the point you get across when you misspell words is that you’re stupid.”

One reason for poor spelling is increased reliance on spell-check software, which as we all know, is far from infallible.

The other is texting, where one types “cu” instead of “see you.”

Spelling skills are declining, but do you agree that readers readily accept this decline and are no longer bothered by spelling errors?

Or do you agree with Marilyn vos Savant, arguably one of the world’s smartest people, who says spelling errors “nearly always cause the reader to form a negative view about the writer’s inherent abilities, and they certainly cast an unflattering light on the written piece as a whole.”

Lots of pompous pseudo-intellectual new media advocates talk almost daily about the rise of YouTube, Facebook, blogging, podcasting, RSS, and other electronic social media — and the demise of what they derisively call “intrusion marketing” — mostly direct mail, commercials, ads, and the like.

So to these young geniuses, I pose a question.

If social media and other forms of electronic two-way communication are making traditional “dead tree” media obsolete, why hasn’t direct mail — perhaps the most intrusive of the paper-based marketing media — disappeared?

According to the Winterberry Group, total U.S. direct mail spending in 2007 was $58.4 billion, an increase of 18.2% over the $49.4 billion spent in 2004.

What gives?

If “no one reads direct mail anymore” as one blogging consultant told me recently, why are advertisers spending more than $58 billion a year on it?

Are they insane? Do they love to throw away money?

Or is someone in this electronic era actually (gasp) opening, reading, and responding to advertising (intrusion marketing) sent through the U.S. Postal Service (an archaic, old-fashioned channel)?

Source: DM News, 3/31/08, p. 8.