Niall Budds

Those of you who have read my occasional blogs will be familiar with my ongoing frustration with my mortgage lender.  I wrote in the past how little they seemed to know and appreciate me for my many years of business, and seemed unprepared or unable to reward that loyalty in any tangible way (i.e. with money!).  Well I finally broke free from them about a month ago.  I used a broker and found a new lender who was prepared to give me a much better deal, saving me thousands of dollars in the process.  But wait … fast forward to a couple of weeks ago as I prepared to send my first payment to the new mortgage holder.  I got a letter in the mail explaining that my mortgage had been sold to … you guessed it … my previous lender.  Small world!  The irony is that not only did they lose my business before, but they had to pay to get it back again.  How hard would it have been to give me a slightly better rate and keep my business in the first place?

So here I am again and, in the...

As a frequent flyer one of my pet peeves is the presentation of credit card offers by flight attendants on behalf of their financial services partners.  I feel bad for the flight attendants having to sell this stuff, presumably to get commission to supplement their incomes.  However what really irritates me is the assumption that I am willing to listen to or am even remotely interested in hearing yet another credit card offer, especially when they know I am a captive audience.  

So I want to start a “do not solicit” list for frequent flyers (I am only half kidding) which would prohibit this annoying interruption.  It seems like the worst form of untargeted marketing.  Surely the airlines and their partners have learned the lesson of the past several years that the more relevant and timely your offer, and the more personalized its presentation, the better your chances of conversion. 

Why is it that these particular...

I recently worked with the marketing team in a large global organization.  They engaged us to help them to become (in their words) more “efficient”.  Their hypothesis was that both the efficiency problem and its solution lay somewhere at the intersection between their processes and their marketing systems.  However we quickly discovered that people had very different definitions of “efficiency.”

To some, especially those who support the execution of a what seems like a never-ending series of outbound marketing campaigns, it meant achieving a better work-life balance.  To others it meant getting even more work done with the same resources.  Then there were people who felt that by further embracing marketing technology, they would be able to better manage productivity and potentially reduce marketing cost.