South Jersey

Denny Hatch is the author of six books on marketing and four novels, and is a direct marketing writer, designer and consultant. His latest book is “Write Everything Right!” Visit him at dennyhatch.com.
Michael Lowenstein, PhD, CMC, is thought leadership principal for Beyond Philosophy, a U.S.-based international customer management experience consultancy. He's an international conference keynoter and speaker, workshop facilitator and trainer, author and a contributor to two customer loyalty newsletters and portals. He has more than 30 years of management and consulting experience with expertise in customer and employee loyalty research, CEM, loyalty program and product/service development, customer win-back, service and channel quality, customer-driven corporate culture, human resource development, and strategic marketing and planning.

"Marketing Nuggets" will include observations regarding trends, and often study results, representing current, real-world issues of high importance to direct marketers. Those issues include omnichannel communication usage, mobile marketing, content, informal offline and online social communication, consumer behavior, message personalization, internal customer-centric processes and organization, strategic customer life cycle planning, proactive employee contribution, etc.

The paper avalanche begins at my home in South Jersey. It's January, and along with the cold, snow and wind—plus post-holiday bills—comes the inevitable volume of bank credit card offers. Hooray! Yesterday's mail represented the normal credit card promotional mini-avalanche: five offers—two from national banks, and three from major regionals. In reviewing the promotions, they are pretty typical, pretty similar in positioning and messaging, and all pretty much hit several of the following, non-personalized, push offer components:

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"When in doubt, do the obvious,” said my first mentor in business, Franklin Watts. In 1993, my wife, Peggy, and I bought a Center City Philadelphia fixer-upper row house, which we gutted and turned into our dream pad. However, a number of the designer light fixtures were esoteric—not the kind stocked at the A&P or even The Home Depot.

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