What Looked Good Then

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

 

By Ray Schultz

Think back to a hundred years ago. Woodrow Wilson was President, Jess Willard was heavyweight champ and a terrible world war was being fought in Europe (one that we’d soon be fighting, too). But business went on—especially B2B business. And there were new tools for targeting customers. We’ve mentioned this before, but here’s the Scientific American story that described the cutting-edge technology of the time—metal punch-cards. It may sound primitive now, but it lasted right into the 1960s, and probably even longer for some backwards companies. Here’s the report in its entirety, from the Nov. 18, 1916 issue:

 The Doom of the Hand-Picked Mailing List

Suppose you were at the head of the sales force of a large jobbing house, and in planning your fall campaign wanted a list of all dealers who had bought a thousand dollars last year and had paid promptly when due. And suppose your accounting department were sufficiently up to date to possess a card ledger. What would you do?

The chances are that you would get a clerk to plough through that card ledger and pick out all the cards on which the postings showed the conditions in question to have been met. Then a week later you would chase another man through the cards on a still-hunt for a class of smaller customers, and he would find several buyers of the first class who had been overlooked, and who had consequently been mortally insulted by the failure of your first flight of agents to call.

In addition to this inaccuracy, the compiling of handpicked lists from a card file consumes a lot of time. This appears to be of no great moment in the case cited, except in so far as the clerk’s time is money. But imagine a valued customer, in any line of trade, kept cooling his heels for a couple of hours while the index was examined, card by card, for a property meeting all of his rather complex requirements. His state of mind would probably be such as to indicate clearly to the seller the wisdom of the invention of a San Francisco man which has made obsolete the time-killing and patience-trying business of thumbing over the card index for information.

The theory of this device is simple enough. Each question which the cards are designed to answer about the names appearing on them is assigned a definite position; and in that position on each card appears a little round hole. As long as the hole stays there, the card answers the question by “No”; as the course of business reveals the fact that the answer should be “Yes,” the card is modified to make it so—the hole is removed.

The reader will laughingly ask how to remove a hole By his ingenious reply the inventor has at the same time solved the urgent problem of how to make the card speak up and tell its story. The way to remove a hole, he argues, is to swallow it up in a bigger one; and then of course the way to find whether it has been removed is to put something in it that would fit the original opening and see whether it still fits.

Let us look at a concrete instance to see how the thing works. We illustrate the card used by a large California land company in the classification of its inquiries. As in every case the holes are in uniformly spaced rows and columns. Beside each appears, in words or when necessary by key number, an indication of the information which it gives. In addition each hole carries a number corresponding to tits position. It is found convenient to group in the same row or column holes which give information in the same field; it is then frequently possible to use general headings which abbreviate the headings of the individual holes

 It is plain that with all the cards in a drawer punched in the same way, the entire collection may be locked in place by the insertion of a rod into one of the series of superposed holes thus provided. But if on any card one of the holes be enlarged, an effort to lock the cards by the use of this hole will leave that particular card free to move. This leads us to the modus operandi of the new file.

Initially all the holes are intact, all the questions answered “No.” As a posting is made or information developed which makes the correct answer “Yes, a long, narrow hand-punch is applied to the hole, joining it with the on immediately below it. Thus the card illustrated states that Mr. Roe has inquired for a small tract of improved land in San Joaquin County suitable for residence and dry farming. He will be especially interested in terms and school facilities, and has a friend in the neighborhood. He wants land suitable for poultry and small fruits.

The first time a small tract of improved land in San Joaquin County is placed in the hands of this concern the drawer containing these records of inquiries is placed upon a table. In the drawer front are holes corresponding to those in the cards. In the positions 12, 23, 33, metal rods are thrust right through the drawer from front to back, after which the drawer is turned upside down. Every card which has not had all three holes 12, 23, 33, extended by the slot punch will be locked in place by the three roads; every card which has these three slots, on the other hand, will at once slide down and project below the others. By rods through one or two of the bottom row of holes, which is there for just this purpose, the projecting cards are prevented from siding back when the drawer is righted. The rods which served to separate these cards from the body of the file are then withdrawn, and the selected cards may be removed one by one and examined.

It will be seen that any single item can be selected by using a single rod, or that any combination of items, however complicated, may be secured by using a quantity of rods. It is a simple matter, for instance, to pick out all inquiries who want to rent a large unimproved tract convenient to a school; all stock purchased within a given period for given departments from given manufacturers and retailing within a given price range; or to discover whether an employee exists who has a high record of sales and personal efficiency who speaks Spanish and Portuguese, who is a Catholic and single, who has a high school education and is familiar with the details of certain departments of the business. How long, under the old systems, would it take the president of the Steel Corporation, for instance, to find such an employee to send to South America? The punch holes would locate him or deny his existence in two minutes.

This appears to be the file without restriction. In the one drawer the records are responsive to alphabetical, chronological, geographical, numerical or topical selection without disarrangement, delay or confusion. The holes may occupy the entire card or they may be placed at the bottom of a larger ledger card, with space above for postings. And if you ask the file a foolish question, it refuses to answer—that is, it “throws a blank.” Thus if you try to locate all names living in Boston and in New York, the Boston rod locks all the New Yorkers, the New York rod locks all Bostonians, and both these lock all other cards. A similar result will follow any impossible classification which may be attempted.

Swimming With the Big Fishes

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

What does it take to be a top marketing performer? A focus on customer relationships and a willingness to spend money on technology, according to a survey by Salesforce.

Of the 4,000 firms surveyed, 48% of the high performers are substantially increasing their spending on marketing tools and technology, compared with 23% of the moderate performers and 27% of the underperformers.

How does Salesforce define high performers and moderates? As follows:

High performers , who represent 18% of the firms surveyed, are extremely satisfied with the results of their marketing investments. Moderate performers, 68% of the whole, are only moderately satisfied. And the underperformers are “slightly or not at all satisfied.”

What do these folks worry about?

The top performers fret most about keeping pace with their customers, producing original content and talent acquisition. In contrast, the purported “moderate” performers are concerned about budget constraints, building customer relationships and new business development.

That’s very enlightening, but I wonder: Just how scientific is it when you’re asking a company to rate its own performance?

Pessimists can call themselves “underperformers,” and still deserve a higher rating. And optimists may not be doing as well as they think.

That said, here’s what the survey found. Overall, 35% of all marketers consider customer satisfaction their first measure of success. For 33%, it’s revenue growth and 24% cite customer acquisition.

At the same time, 37% list brand awareness as a top priority, compared with 34% who seek higher levels of customer engagement and 25% who cite social media engagement.

Based on the survey, digital marketing now gets 70% of the average marketing budget, compared with 62% in 2011. And the total is expected to hit 75% by 2021.

That said, here are some best practices that emerge from the survey. High performers are:

  • 8.8 times more likely to adopt a customer journey strategy as part of the overall business strategy.
  • 13.7 times more likely than the others to integrate their business systems to obtain a single view of the customer.
  • 34.4 times more likely to be excellent at creating personalized omni-customer experiences.
  • 10.7 times more likely to use predictive intelligence.
  • 7.2 times more likely to use web personalization.
  • 2.8 times more likely to substantially increase spending on marketing tools and technology.
  • 9.7 times more likely to be actively mapping the customer journey.
  • 3.3 times more likely to lean on CRM tools.

Got it all? Now here’s a couple of additional state to keep in mind: 63% of the high rollers are implementing digital transformation across the company, compared with 23% of the moderate performers and 8% of the underperformers.

Similar percentages excel at collaborating with other business units.

And not that this is any revelation, but 91% use data to segment or target advertising.

Salesforce surveyed 4,000 marketers, 32% of them in the U.S., 11% in Canada and 11% in the United Kingdom. Smaller percentages are in Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia, France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Bogus Blurbs

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Ladies Home Journal is not known for its investigative journalism. In 1906, though, it published a story titled, The Inside Story of a Sham, about phony testimonials in patent medicine ads, exposing the inside workings of a highly fraudulent business.

The article started with the fact that the medicine sellers brazenly used real peoples’ names without their permission. For example, a Senator whose signature appeared in ads wrote that he had not endorsed the product, and that he had never even received the sample that supposedly was sent to him. Another notable threatened legal action if the medicine sellers didn’t stop quoting him by name. Author Mark Sullivan wanted to know: How did the medicine sellers get these peoples’ signatures? Here’s what he uncovered. (Note: we’ve maintained his spelling).

I found that there are three men, rivals in trade, who make a business of securing these indorsements for “patent medicines” from prominent men. They are known as “testimonial-brokers.” The best-known and most successful of the three was approached one day last spring by a man who represented a well-known “patent medicine.” The medicine man states his case: he was about to extend the advertising of his “medicine” and he wanted testimonials. In short, he put it to the testimonial-getter concretely by saying that he wanted signed testimonials from, say, one hundred Members of Congress, Governors, and men high in the Army and Navy. The testimonial-getter was perfectly at home in this situation. He figured on the contract as an architect would estimate on a house.

Confirming my talk with Mr. _________, I will undertake to obtain testimonials from Senators at seventy-five dollars each, and from Congressman at forty dollars on a prearranged contract. A contract for not less than $5,000 would meet my requirements in the testimonial line.

I can put your matter in good shape shortly after Congress meets if we come to an agreement. We can’t get Roosevelt, but we can get men and women of national reputation, and we can get their statements in convincing form and language.

 Here it was then—an actual business!

 The next point I wanted to find out was: Who gets the seventy-five dollars or the forty dollars? Not the Senator or Congressman, I found. It is true that there are a few public men who have a financial interest in “patent medicines”; but none sells his name outright for seventy-five or forty dollars. The testimonial-getter explained this:

 “The knowing how to approach each individual is my stock in trade. Only a man of wide acquaintance of men and things could carry it out. Often I employ women. Women know how to get around public men. For example, I know that Senator A.________has a poverty-stricken cousin who works as a seamstress. I go to her and offer her twenty-five dollars to get the Senator’s signature to a testimonial.
But most of it I do through newspaper correspondents here in Washington. Take the Senator from some Southern State. That Senator is very dependent on the Washington correspondent of the leading newspaper in his State. By the dispatches which that correspondent sends back the Senator’s career is made or marred. So I go to that correspondent. I offer him fifty dollars to get the Senator’s testimonial. The Senator may squirm , but he’ll sign all right. Then there are a number of easy-going Congressmen who needn’t be seen at all. I can sign their names in anything and they’ll stand for it. And there are always a lot of poverty-stricken, broken-down Army veterans hanging around Washington. For a few dollars they’ll go to their old Army officers on a basis of an old acquaintance’ sake, and get testimonials.”

Assuming that was true, it doesn’t say much for the journalistic ethics of those home-town correspondents.

Just as bad, in Sullivan’s view, were the unauthorized testimonials from ordinary people. In one case, a woman said that she “had never used the ‘medicine’ she was advertised to indorse., but that a man had called on her, offered to have a dozen photographs of her taken at the best gallery in her city, and she could have them all free of charge if she would sign the letter and let her photograph be printed. She did, and she got the photographs, but she had never had the ailment spoken of in the advertisement, and had never tasted a drop of the “medicine.”

Well, at least she got the photos. Many people got nothing. And some victims had their names used because they were actually taking the medicines, and were so zonked that they didn’t care if their names were used. Sullivan explains:

 Where the “testimonials” seemed genuine, I found that either the cocaine or the morphine in the “medicine” soothed the pain of the victim, or the strychnine or alcohol exhilarated the taker. But as to a genuine case of actual good gone or help received, except fancied, I could not find a single one of all those I investigated.

Well, so much for honesty in that supposedly golden time, but it didn’t go on for long: The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed that same year, and put most of the patent medicine sellers out of business (along with some testimonial brokers, no doubt). Still, online scam artists post fraudulent testimonials even now. Ladies’ Home Journal should look into it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spanish Dance

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By Ray Schultz

On Thursday, my wife Andrea and I had one of those rare experiences at Carnegie Hall: A piano recital by the young Spanish pianist Jose Menor. The concert was devoted to Enrique Grenados’ Goyescas, a suite of piano pieces inspired by Goya’s sketches of everyday life in Spain. And in transporting the audience on this hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death, Menor showed that he may be a worthy replacement for the late Alicia de Larrocha as the leading interpreter of Grenados in our time.

But my purpose here isn’t to write a piece of musical criticism. It’s to tell you a very personal story.

The time was Labor Day Weekend in 2001. Idly browsing in Barnes & Noble, we bought a Pablo Cassals CD titled Legendary Casals Performances, Early Recordings 1925-1928. It featured pieces by Chopin, Saint-Saens, Popper, Bach and Debussy, all played in that rich, warm, golden tone that only Cassals achieved on the cello, with piano accompaniment.

We played it once or twice, then forgot about it. Who had the time? A week later, planes flew into the World Trade Center, and the buildings came crashing down. Notwithstanding that a neighbor was killed in the event (Glenn Winuk, a lawyer and volunteer fireman who tried to save others and had, in fact, done the same thing during the 1993 Trade Center attack), we were a mile or two away, and could make no claim of suffering. But we were depressed and anxious, as were most people in New York (and, we suspect, the rest of the country).

Drawn back to dead European men, as they say, we returned to the Cassals CD. And the seventh piece on the CD reduced both of us: On the CD cover, it was titled, simply, Spanish Dance, although it’s really Spanish Dance No. 5. Written by Granados, the selection starts in a minor key. Then, switching from cello to piano, it ascends to a sixth major chord, and then up to the seventh, before eventually returning to the minor.

Neither of us is well-educated in music. But when the piece swooped upwards and hit those major chords, we felt that life, however fragile, would go on for a time, and that we had to enjoy these moments. I often think of that epiphany when spreading cream cheese on a bagel on Sunday morning.

Yeah, I know, a cynic shouldn’t indulge in this kind of sappiness. But we tend to forget what it was like in the aftermath of 9/11. Wusses that we are, we got emotional over very little. And Grenados helped bring us around. Maybe it was the tinny sound of the almost 80 year-old Cassals recording. How could you not think of your grandparents and the world they lived in?

The months passed. And as we returned to shopping (as commanded by our president), we decided to delve into Enrique Grenados. We learned that he was born in 1867 in Spain, and was a piano virtuoso and a varied composer, bringing a touch of modernism to his particular Spanish music.

Born in 1923, the renowned pianist Alicia de Larrocha grew up hearing about him, although she didn’t play the “real Grenados” until after the Spanish Revolution. “He was a very sensitive, very romantic man, with big eyes and…well, you know that kind of man in that period of history,” she said in an interview with David Dubal for his classic book Reflections from the Keyboard. “Very romantic, very sensitive, and poetic—yes, and a very good-looking man. Very good-looking. Beautiful eyes. So he had many, many romances and many, many women fell in love with him. And, I wouldn’t say my mother was really in love with him, but she had some admiration and something for him that was very strong.”

Dubal asked de Larrocha to compare playing Goyescas and Issac Albeniz’s Iberia.

“They are so different,” she answered. “Goyescas is very difficult but it requires a different technique. You have to adapt your technique for Goyescas and forget Goyescas when you go to Iberia. But in a way, perhaps Goyescas is more pianistic. Grenados was a great, great pianist and it was easy for him to play. Albeniz, at the time he was writing Iberia, was not playing, so it was more intellectual.”

Thus inspired, we bought several more Grenados CDs, most by de Larrocha, went to concerts, and achieved at least a passing understanding of Grenados’ catalogue. And we mourned de Larrocha’a passing in 2009.

But we learned something about a year after 9/11. And there’s no way to make sense of it. It was that Enrique Grenados died in 1916 when a ferry boat he was on in the English Channel was torpedoed by a German U boat. He drowned trying to save his wife.

How very strange that Grenados perished in a military attack on civilians, an act of terrorism by a state, if you will. And here we were, cluelessly using him to comfort us after a terrorist attack in New York.

What does this coincidence mean? Most likely, as R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural says to Flakey Foont, it “don’t mean sheeitt.” But it has strengthened what will be a lifetime devotion to Enrique Grenados.

And we wonder: Did Grenados have any kind of premonition when he wrote those chords in Spanish Dance No. 5 in 1890? What would have he have made of the Spanish Civil War, which he could have well lived to see? We’ll never know. But Spanish Dance No. 5, and the rest of Grenados’ body of work, has sustained us through good and bad times ever since. Is it any mystery that we feel what can only be described as gratitude?

Note: The particular recording we cherish doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube. But here’s a 1916 version by Cassals—and an identical arrangement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Body Armor

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

This week’s historical piece addresses a delicate subject: corsets. Or, rather, corsets and content.

In 1929, Charis of St. Paul sent a brochure for its “superior foundation garment.” The fold-out piece featured spot color, and photos of women wearing the patented corset (although it never used that term).

The only response mechanism is a St. Paul address and phone number, so this was obviously a local effort. The garment couldn’t be bought in a store, or ordered by mail—instead, it was delivered in person by a Charis representative.

Here’s how content was done 87 years ago. The cover asks the question, “What has become of the middle-aged woman?” And the copy on the flip page answers the question:

What has become of the Middle-aged” Woman?

The pathetic, “middle-aged” woman of yesterday is the mature, young woman of today. Instead of a drab, monotonous existence, she leads a useful, interesting life.

For the active, smartly dressed, modern woman, whose figure has matured with her years, CHARIS is a superior foundation garment from every point of view.

To begin with , CHARIS is adjustable, so that the wearer as she puts it on, can improve her figure wherever desired. Ungraceful development of waist, hips or thighs can be corrected, the abdomen flattened—creating smart youthful lines from bust to knees. This re-proportioning of the figure is accomplished without any restriction of movement. The garment can be worn continuously with perfect comfort.

CHARIS is light in weight and contains a minimum of boning, yet it provides exactly the physical support most mature women need. An important feature is the Inner Belt, which supports the abdomen in correct position, affording protection against strain and depleted vitality.

CHARIS is a patented garment. The advantages of its adjustable feature cannot be secured elsewhere.

You can examine CHARIS in the private of your home whenever convenient. This superior garment is not sold in stores but will be brought directly to you by a representative of this company. To secure further information, including free demonstration if desired, please communicate with the address on the back of this leaflet.

The following pages contain full-page photos of variations, with descriptions:

Observe how CHARIS controls and reproportions the well developed figure, without restriction of movement. In addition to producing attractive, youthful lines CHARIS permits perfect physical relaxation with comfort in any position. Continued use of CHARIS will usually effect a permanent reduction in bust and hip measurements.

For the women of average figure, the garment illustrated below is a particularly desirable model. It is made with the convenient Midway Opening (midway between center front and underarm). Notice the smooth, youthful contour and this garment creates. This and other models can be had with cool net or rayon top for summer.

The unique adjustability and complete superior of CHARIS make it a desirable garment for every woman—slender or stout. There are odd and even sizes, 32 to 56 bust. Detachable shoulder straps are a great convenience. The garment launders beautifully and gives long services. A wide selection of models and materials is provided.

The rear cover shows a fully dressed woman (presumably Mrs. Charis, if there was one), and asks the question: “Will you let her help YOU, too?”

At the risk of seeming lurid, there was one curious historical detail: The garments featured clips for holding up stockings, which were worn in each of the photos.