Monthly Archives: October 2014

direct mail, Marketing

Presidential Letter-Writing: Good, Bad and You Know…

letter-writingA key principle of direct mail strategy is building the personal connection.   Traditional mail order mavens personalize a relationship with a letter from the president, or owner of the business.   When a customer buys, not only are they endorsing the product, but they are also connecting with the owner, who is implicitly guaranteeing satisfaction.

So when you are making the choice to use a letter or not, you are really deciding, “is this going to be personal, or just business?”   Put another way, is this admail, or direct mail?

Within the letter-signing world however, there are good and bad examples.

The best is the personally signed note.   Not economical, but surely convincing.

AAA HuffstetterThe least persuasive is the typeset signature.   Paranoiacally concerned a signature analyst is going to tear it apart.

But there is something far more worrying.

Perusing the news, I saw a photograph of the President’s signature on the Affordable Care Act.   Put aside the law’s contents, what was striking was the shaky signature.

obama signatureAs if our leader had pauses in memory, moments of hesitation, stopping half way through a letter, and then continuing the curve until the next stop.

You may already know this, but in case you have been a life-long libertarian ignoring all laws, and thus this quirky writing habit of CEOs, the jerky writing is attributed to using multiple pens to sign the official document.

In the case of the ACA, there were 22 pens.   See how healthcare costs add up so quickly?

But I digress.   I did a search on this multiple pen phenomenon, and up popped a Time Magazine article with the same signature incident, along with the headline suggesting that our President may have an undiagnosed case of OCD. 

See how a signature creates an image?

Obsessive-compulsive or not, one cannot mail a lot in a full 12-hour day with this type of pen-stutter.

Better, is the thoughtful touch of our third President, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson MachineRecognizing the power of automation, married seamlessly to manual control, he introduced the polygraph to the Department of State.   This contraption was invented in 1803 by John Isaac Hawkins, of Frankford,  Pennsylvania.

Using the polygraph Jefferson was able to create up to five letters with one sweep of the pen.

Did he know how important direct mail fundraising would become 200 years later?

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Sports, Wildlife

October 29, An Unintended World Series Moment

Sarnia – Ontario Border Town.

Moments after Game 7 started, a quick visit to the parking lot of our hotel presented this fleeting pleasure: the smell of Fall.

It’s cool here, about 45’F, and the air is refreshingly moist, a mile away from the St. Clair River.

There is an enchanting fragrance in the air. It’s the sweet musty smell of old leaves. Millions of oak, maple and ash leaves, colorful all day,  have fallen to the ground, and are settling in to their final journey of decay. Above them, several million more are hanging on, urging their last breath through the night air.

The bouquet excites the olfactories. It ignites memories of secret Halloween raids on dark nights, running down alley ways and through back yards, over fences, chasing, or being chased.

All the while, there’s this intoxicating sensation from long ago: the cold brew of spent leaves, spiced with distant wood smoke, floating across the yards, streets and empty verandas of a small country town.

Upstairs, it’s 2-0, San Francisco over Kansas City, top of the 2nd.

I really hate to leave this, but it’s baseball.

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Economics, Environment

Gassed: How Our Utility Co Turns Down The Heat

Odds are, if you get a gas bill, you are also getting a report card in the mail too.

"Loser!"

             “Loser!”

Our gas company mailed us a Home Energy Report for last month, telling us how we stacked up against our uproariously wasteful and spendthrift neighbors.

Turns out: WE are worse than them.

It is a sad reality that I respond to competitive taunts, and right now, our gas company is yanking my chain.

You see, they previously sent us a report for last winter.   It had a little smiley face–which really is smirking–that says “GOOD”.

But I know what it’s thinking: “LOSER!”

"Good maybe, but not great."

“Good maybe, but not great.”

Beside Mr. Smiley is a bar chart that highlights our “Efficient Neighbors” in green. These are the raucous ones last New Years Eve that roasted a quarter steer on the gas grill while they played Marco Polo in a mammoth hot tub.  They have 9 kids, two washing machines and a greenhouse.

"With all due respect, your numbers suck, big time."

“With all due respect Mr. Brown, your numbers suck, big time.”

Then the report shows a longer blue bar — which is bad–that is entitled “YOU”.  In bold.

So I am now energized (hah hah) to understand how our humble little household can possibly respond to this blatant miscall.

I wonder if the gas company is playing with me.

There was once a TV movie in which a dad and his son fill up the neighbor’s gas tank every night to listen to him brag about his car’s great mileage.    Then after a few weeks, they siphon gas out every night to hear him complain about the guzzler he is driving.

Is there a prankster somewhere in the seventh floor of an office building in Chicago who is twiddling with my score, just to see how I react?

dr-zhivago-datcha-600

                                               “Just check that thermostat again.”

Worse yet, maybe they are not playing tricks at all.   Maybe our modest ranch is actually a gas-guzzling super nova.  A galactic black hole sucking energy into a cosmic chimney.

That might account for the drafts.

I am going to give the gas company the benefit of the doubt for the moment.   When I investigated the source of these reports, I learned that they come from a company called Opower.

There is a lab-coated millennial there who is modifying my “demand response behavior” while flipping through Hunger Games.

Essentially, Opower has placed my house on a giant leader board with about 50 million other households, and lo and behold, we are not on the top of the list.

Dinner at our neighbors.

Dinner at our neighbors.

I’d like to see the hermit who is.  Probably dressed in yak skins and eating his fish raw.

To their credit, however, they have shamed enough people in the last few years to reduce natural gas consumption nearly 2%.

And what is more confounding, improved consumer satisfaction ratings for the gas company by 5 points!

Talk about a world upside down.   Running against the natural order of things.

Our new HVAC guy, en repose.

Our new HVAC guy, en repose.

I am not beaten though.   I will climb that list.   I will lay down a 2-foot-thick blanket of moss in our attic.   Line the windowpanes with hay bales.   Wrap the basement in a giant Snuggie and remove the furnace.

Better yet, I will hang out with our neighbors.

Thanks for reading!  If you get these reports too, I feel for you.   But they are actually a pretty useful tool.   Unless you live in the woods.

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direct mail, Marketing, Politics

Fall Seat Sale: The Check’s In the Mail

RNC 558

A dollar a seat… get ’em while they’re hot!

My walk to the mailbox today was rewarded with a letter from John McCain’s desk.

It was especially exciting to get his letter, because he enclosed a personal check!   Usually this works the other way around.

Anyway, I opened his letter to find a check for $36 bucks.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your political stripe, it was made out to the Republican National Committee.

This is a very crafty gambit.

RNC 561 copy 2

Is it really the desk writing?  I wonder.

Seldom do we receive checks, and this one, measuring a modest 6″ x 2-3/4″ looks like the real thing.

What I liked about the approach of this fundraiser was the rationale.   The U.S. Senate has 36 seats up for grabs in the mid-term election, and McCain is donating a dollar for each seat.

I know, I know.  It should be more, but hey, have you seen his suits?

Sartorial comments aside, the dollar-a-seat strategy is a door opener for the tight-fisted, like me.   He is asking me to match his donation.

But I am puzzled. The RNC goes on to say it requires only $8,000,000 in the next ten days.  This seems like chicken feed compared to the dollars normally needed to buy an election.   I hope they know what they are doing.

RNC 557

The envelope needs to be opened, just to see the check!

In any event, they are counting on 222,222 folks like me, at $36 each, to respond.   At a 2% response rate, they must be asking over 11 million people.

I will leave the financial logistics to the back room guys.

I would point out, however, that after wresting $36 from my cold, thrifty mitts, John could have at least coughed up an additional 49-cents for the stamp on the return envelope.

A stamp! A stamp! The Senate for want of a stamp!

A stamp! A stamp! The Senate for want of a stamp!

You see, the face value of a stamp may seem like a lot to the RNC, but in this case, each one is worth $36 dollars.

Don’t forget to vote!

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direct mail, Sports

Mail Order Law Course

Only a couple weeks ago I excitedly popped my member application into the mail to the U.S. Golfing Association.

Tell me you agree: there is nothing like the anticipation attached to mail order, waiting for that parcel to arrive.   In this case, the USGA won me over with membership to their organization, and sweetened the deal with their 2015 Chambers Bay Open hat.

The Hat: Mailorder Delivers!

The Hat: Mailorder Delivers!

But there was more. They also promised an official member card, and a golf bag tag, and… the USGA official book, Rules of Golf.

Today, my package arrived, and I had torn it open by the time I had walked up the driveway.

Up until now, I had viewed the game of golf as an enjoyable diversion: walking the fairway in search of a runaway ball, or flumped on a couch Sunday afternoon, taking vicarious enjoyment and frustration while millionaires bounced shots off spectators onto lush, hand-tweezed greens.

IMG_1139

“I did not know that!”

With the Rules of Golf in hand, the sport has new deeper meaning, with profound implications.

It’s much like my driving a car for all my life.   Only now to find that our state Rules of the Road, or Driver’s Handbook has 96 pages of rules, none of which I knew.

The USGA book is twice the size.

As a duly accredited and newly admitted USGA member, I opened the Rules of Golf.   About the size of the iPhone 6, it has 208 pages, written in 6-point type.  It fits in my back pocket, and just like the iPhone 6, it bends easily.

It turns out that there are only 34 rules.  Well, 34 subject areas perhaps.   Then the lawyers have their say.

But in a moment of merciful brevity, the governors have provided “A Quick Guide to the Rules of Golf”.  Kind of like a Cliff Notes.  It’s only 7 pages, which you might browse through as you pay your green fees.

In a like-minded spirit of expedition, I am not going to review all the rules with you here, but I would be remiss in not highlighting a few key canons of the game.

For instance, the attention to nuance as noted on page 9: “Understand The Words”.   You won’t find this type of consideration in the Drivers’ Handbook.

Grammar 101, with the bark left on.

Grammar 101, with the bark left on.

Or the oblique reference to emotion in the section on Unnecessary Damage, page 21.

"Now settle down, or we will stop the cart!"

“Now settle down, or we will stop the cart!”

Not to mention on page 37, the inside lore of match play, which identifies the condition for being a “dormie”.  We gather this is not a sleep mate, necessarily.USGA 534dormie

And the curious, repetitive references to remnants of manufactured ice which apparently is randomly found across the boundless green of the course.   One needs to study the forensics on this phenomenon.USGA 533 ice

And it pops up again…USGA 535ice casual water

Lastly, as we can expect, the USGA staffers make earnest attempts to define a circumstance for clearer understanding, as shown in the “Nearest Point of Relief”, page 30.

Not necessarily "fast acting" relief.

Not necessarily “fast acting” relief.

With that, I am off to the club, with my legal team in tow, and “for the good of the game”!IMG_1152

 

Thanks for reading!   In the midwest, the days are getting shorter, and the opportunity to enjoy a walk in temperate climate and sunshine is shrinking.  Kudos to USGA and their mission to bring golf to all who would enjoy the sport.  

“For The Good Of The Game” is copyright USGA.

 

 

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