Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

You Get This Newsletter Every Saturday, Right?

If you want to see what a mix of professionalism, free information, and personal expression looks like, get on this email subscription (I've been here for more than a decade, long enough to see his kids grow up and move into college and begin careers).

Saturday's email was about the resurgence of brand marketing ... which is interesting because on many recent video conferences there have been robust discussions about the death of catalog marketing and the importance of email marketing as one of the few ways to have an actual "relationship" with a customer.

25 Years

It's almost unfathomable that a full generation has passed since 9/11. Twenty-five years. More than a quarter of the people who experienced that day are no longer with us, including 3 out of 8 of the adults who experienced that day.

Pressure causes people to behave in interesting ways. On 9/11, I recall a peer VP sobbing. An Executive looked at me and said "Why is she so sensitive?". He then locked myself and my Marketing Director in a conference room from 2:30pm - 7:00pm because, as he said, "we'll get an opportunity to fix the business and nobody will be here to bother us". I sent my employees home, then failed to fix the business during the 4.5 hour session. Obviously, the Leader was responding to pressure in a manner inconsistent with logic. It's easy to feel empathy for the Leader today. I felt something different that afternoon.

A woman I've played pickleball with described what it was like to try to get out of the city on 9/11. Her ordeal was obviously more harrowing than a 4.5 hour session in a stale conference room.

It's like the events of that day sent us down a different reality path ... not unlike the one in Back to the Future where our heroes end up in a timeline controlled by Biff Tannen.

No matter what happens, we move forward. We are resilient.

How Do You Know When A Marketing Channel Is Dying?

Last month I was asked this question. What a good question!

In 1999 at Eddie Bauer, I measured "phone" customers ... those who bought by calling our contact center. About 10% of those customers placed an ecommerce order the next time they purchased. Meanwhile, almost no ecommerce customers placed an order using the phone on a next order.

Run that relationship out a few years and it became obvious that the marketing channel known as catalog marketing was doomed.
If you didn't look at the data in this fashion (nobody does), it becomes really difficult to see that a marketing channel is dying. By purposely not running the analysis in this way, one can believe forever that the marketing channel is not dying when it is most certainly not dying.

The relationship I described (identified in 1999) ran like a runaway truck from 2003 - 2013.

About 30% of phone customers placed their next order online.
Virtually no online customers placed their next order via the phone.

By the time we got to 2013, catalog marketing as a discipline was done. No, not to the NEMOA audience obviously, but to any rational observer it was done. By 2013 the rate of phone customers shifting online in their next order was back in the 10% - 15% range. In other words, all the customers who were going to convert to online buying had already converted to online buying. The only customers left were all 60+ years old (in 2013 - imagine their age today).

This is how marketing channels die. It happened to Spiegel / JCP / Sears / Wards. It happened to specialty catalogs. It's going to happen to ecommerce brands over the next decade once the AI bubble pops and newer AI-centric business models emerge from the rubble.

There is going to be "something". You might implement "something" on your old-school website that causes customers to change their behavior. You might push your customers to an AI-infused marketplace (don't do that for Heaven's sake). You might generate traffic on your site from an AI-infused marketplace and notice that you don't have the same traffic from Google. Regardless, "it" is going to happen.

You will measure the dynamic.
If 20% of customers who bought from the old-school channel last year purchase via the new channel this year ... but very few of the new channel customers go back to the old-school channel, you know that a marketing channel is dying.

How many of you measure marketing channels in this manner, show of hands?

Business Isn't Easy

I reviewed all clients who were charter members of my Elite Program back in 2015 ($1,000 per run for existing clients, 3x per year, voluntary performance).

A third of charter members are no longer in business.

All of the brands now out of business were catalog brands.

Other catalog brands were distressed, gobbled up by catalog holding companies.

If you go back to 2007 when I started my consulting work, about 2/3rd of the catalog brands I worked with in my first decade of consulting are gone.

Gone!

No amount of paper / printing / agency discourse changes facts. If you're still here? You did something right!

After the AI bubble pops, there will be new business models. New business models will grow at the expense of existing ecommerce brands. The cycle will repeat. It's unavoidable, it's how capitalism works.

It's also very rewarding to fight against forces working against you ... to persevere, to thrive, to overcome challenges with great merchandise!

Package And A Snack

I ordered a cable (from Bloom Audio) that connects my Qudelix Q5k bluetooth dac/amp to my Apos Gremlin hybrid tube amp (2.5mm balanced to 4.4mm balanced for those nerding out here). It's not exactly the type of solution Walmart or Target tries to solve.

The image below shows what arrived in my package on Thursday.

A thank you note ... and a Starburst fruit chew.

I've told you this story at least a dozen times - I worked with a company that put ghosts in their outgoing package. You received a little note about your ghost, his/her strengths, weaknesses, and potential scenarios where the ghost might influence household activities. On the socials, customers loved this little touch.

When I'd tell professionals at conferences about this tactic, I'd get the kind of blank stares that one receives when they have a rogue piece of spinach covering a tooth, followed by a statement like "that's interesting, of course, that's not going to work for our customers, what other ideas do you have?" And I'd think to myself, "why is it my job to toss ideas out for free, isn't it your job to come up with ideas?"

There's about two months to go ... then many of you become preoccupied with Winning Cyber Monday (#wcm). Until you win by giving 77% off plus free shipping, what can you do with your outgoing packages to help your customers feel special?