Marketers Gone Wild

The Wall St. Journal reports that there will be a concert series called "Social" this summer, in East Hampton, NY. For $15,000 a person, you will get to experience an intimate venue featuring Prince, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, Tom Petty and James Taylor.

For $15,000, you could feed an impoverished African family of four for fifteen years.

Those of us who do direct marketing, catalog marketing, and online marketing need to pay attention to the socio-economic changes bubbling all around us.

The highly affluent are racing off into another strata. The middle class are being clobbered by the flattening of the world. And woe be to the working poor, earning $14 and hour without ever being able to achieve the dream of a middle-classed, median-priced $400,000 home with a white picket fence in a nice neighborhood.

It's easy for marketers to go wild, to chase the money, to "target" a $150,000 a year household.

Now flip the tables. What could you do that would make the working poor, a person earning $14 an hour making Spam (yes, the meat-related product) in Austin, MN, feel great? You probably don't have to put Tom Petty in front of them.

If we want to increase website conversion rates from 3.04% to 3.12%, if we want more than one in five people to even bother to open an e-mail campaign, if we want people to actually be excited to receive a catalog in their mailbox, we should ask ourselves "Does this marketing campaign make a customer feel great?"

I earned $14 an hour, I know what it is like to have $15 to spend on food and entertainment for an entire week. There were a lot of ways to make me feel great.