We live in a society that, for the most part, seems to value speed, efficiency, service, economy, and technology over quality and craftsmanship.

Therefore, those who are true craftsmen or masters of a particular trade are rapidly becoming obsolete or unable to compete in business ? because consumers are not willing to pay a premium for the level of craftsmanship they bring to their product or service.

Example: a local resident in my county has spent his professional life becoming a master at tuning pianos by ear and hand.

But new technology allows far less skilled technicians to tune pianos adequately, using electronic monitors, faster and more efficiently ? and these untrained tuners charge much less.

Photography is another great example of ?the death of craft,? according to BD.

?I am a professional photographer,? says BD. ?I got my skills to a world-class level and realized that ? for the most part ? people no longer cared enough to support my business.?

He blames it, in part, on the frenzied pace of modern society: ?As you know, it follows that the fast pace erodes appreciation for craft in our young.

?If I could produce quality at the speed, price, and efficiency, I?m not sure the young buyers would recognize the quality of craft.?

Another example is graphic design ? and it?s a sad story.

In the early 1980s, when I was an advertising manager for a manufacturing company in New York City, I used SB, a freelance graphic artist, to design our sales brochures.

He was such a meticulous craftsman that, when he got galleys from the typesetter, he would literally cut the text apart word by word ? even letter by letter, at times ? to make it just right.

?Will anyone know the difference?? I asked him.

?I?ll know the difference,? SB replied.

But with the advent of desktop publishing, doing layouts manually faded away, and no one was willing to pay SB?s rates for his level of skill and caring. Clients wanted jobs delivered electronically as Mac files; no one wanted the old-fashioned boards that SB did by hand. And today SB is a doorman in New York City.

How about you? Are you a craftsperson? And do you ever worry about your craft dying out or being rendered obsolete by either technology or changing times?

A business owner recently told me, ?I hired an ad agency that seems to know nothing about direct marketing. When I asked their copywriter whether she?d read John Caples, her response was, ?I?ve never heard of him.??

He was surprised — and dismayed.

But is this as big as sin as he makes it out to be?

In my opinion, yes.

Direct marketing is more complex than most other forms of marketing (online marketing being the possible exception).

There are lots of principles you need to understand, based on millions of dollars of tested results.

To ignore this body of knowledge, accumulated at great cost, is foolhardy.

Especially since this knowledge is readily obtained by reading the books that the top direct marketing experts have written … books in which they freely share what they know.

Click here for my list of the 10 marketing books every direct marketer absolutely must read.

How many of these have you read? If you haven?t read them, why not? What books would you recommend instead?

My colleague CM, one of the world?s most successful DM copywriters, shocked me when I asked him about his success.

?Forget all that advice about ?do what you?re passionate about,?? CM told me. ?Work is about making money — as much money as you can.

?For instance, if you love horses, don?t study to be a veterinarian. Instead, go into a business where you make a lot of money. That way, you can own as many horses as you want.?

I?ve always taken a different tact: follow your passion. Do what you love to do, then find a market or application where you can make good money doing it.

Most successful people I know worked hard to get where they are. And you won?t put in long hours unless you truly love what you do.

Whose approach do you like: CM’s or mine? And why?

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Am I wrong, or has technology ? specifically, the Internet, desktop pubishing, and printing on demand ? reduced two of my favorite things in the world, books and writing, to mere commodities?

When I started out as a writer at Westinghouse in the late 1970s, managers who wanted to demean the craft of writing called it ?word-smithing.?

But I think that the true demise of the craft was signaled when people began referring to writing as ?content? ? which, like pork or butter, sounds like something that should be sold by the pound.

Certainly, with 150,000 books published every year, we?re suffering from a new kind of pollution ? ?content pollution.? There?s simply too much to read, and not enough time to read it.

I worry that, every time I write in my blog, or write an article or a book, I am contributing to this content pollution.

After all, aren?t there already a million others already writing on the same topics and saying the same things? And isn?t that true for virtually every author ? and every topic ? on the planet?

In a recent segment of the reality TV series The Simple Life, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were interning at a New York creative ad agency.

The boss gave Nicole a terribly important assignment: reserving a table for lunch at a trendy NYC restaurant that is usually booked up a week in advance.

When Nicole completed the task successfully, the agency owner told her, ?I think you have what it takes to make it in this business!?

Unfortunately, I don?t think he was joking.

The three-martini lunch on Madison Avenue is a clich?, but amazingly, certain businesses ? advertising and publishing among them ? still seem to embrace it.

Here?s what this says to me about the agency employing Paris and Nicole:

1. They are so untalented that their method of making a client happy is to take him to lunch.

2. They place little value on their time (these fancy restaurant lunches can easily take 2 hours or more).

3. They don?t offer real value (in terms of increasing client ROI), and they hope by entertaining the client well no one will notice.

Maybe I?m just reading too much into this. But in my 25 years in marketing ? 23 years as a freelance copywriter and 2 years on the client side ? I saw too many agencies who viewed taking the client to a fancy lunch as their major achievement.

How sad — and pathetic.

It?s this?.

By proclaiming that ?markets are conversations,? and that talking with customers is the ultimate marketing methodology, Cluetrain ignores this important truism from Rene Descartes:

?To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.?

That?s where we direct marketers have it all over the Cluetrain crowd.

We aren?t guided just by what people say they want or will do; we primarily pay attention to what they actually do ? in other words, what they buy.

You can determine what your prospects will buy based on your own test mailing ? or by studying the successful control mailings of your competitors in the same category.

Because those control mailings are working, they tell you the appeals that are causing customers to open their wallets ? those marketing approaches that are making money right now.

Actions speak louder than words, and what people actually buy is infinitely more important than what they say they will buy.

Which do YOU think is a more accurate indicator of what your market wants ? a ?conversation? or a purchase?

The answer to the ?Test Your Direct Marketing I.Q.? quiz (see below) is (a). When someone makes a donation, you should send a solicitation asking for more money as soon as possible ? ideally, that same day or the next day.

To me, that?s counterintuitive: I?d think that if Joe just gave us money, he would be tapped out and want to wait awhile before giving us more. But testing shows that the opposite is true, and has allowed direct marketers to develop the RFM formula, which stands for recency, frequency, and monetary.

RFM says:

* Recency — the person who bought (or donated) the most recently is the most likely to buy (or donate) again.

* Frequency — the person who buys frequently is more likely to buy again than the person who buys infrequently.

* Monetary — the person who spent the most money is more likely to buy again (and will spend more) than the person who spent less money.

There are very few rules that hold in DM, but RFM is one of them. It is nearly a universal truth, with virtually no exceptions.