Mark Amtower’s Six Habits of Highly Defective People ‘Who Just Don’t Get It’

Mark Amtower, who’s made a career of helping B-to-B catalogers and other direct marketers sell to federal government agencies successfully, was the keynote speaker at a luncheon during last week’s MeritDirect Co-op in White Plains, N.Y., addressing the types of companies and people catalogers ought to steer clear of.

In his presentation, “Six Habits of Highly Defective People ‘Who Just Don’t Get It’,” Amtower humorously, but quite seriously, described these top six in reverse order.

6. A really big company with name recognition, but not built on customer satisfaction or client relationships — instead, built on corporate acquisitions. Such companies “rarely have substance of real market players — people who worked their way up through the trenches,” Amtower said.

Instead, these companies provide second or third tier service. Their marketshare “is ‘rented,’ never owned,” Amtower said. But they don’t “pay” the rent with money. “So sooner or later, you’ll lose that marketshare. You can have time at the top, but it won’t last.”

5. Direct/catalog ad agencies that specialize in no particular market and employ a “one size fits all” approach. Catalog clients that use these (often award-winning) agencies, expect campaigns that’ll lead to overnight domination, Amtower said. “This would be laughable if it weren’t so pitiful,” he noted. “Most big agencies have no clue of market niches, the hot buttons, the lingo or ethical parameters to play in those niches. If you ignore the nuances before you execute the campaign, bad things can happen quickly. It’s bling bling and no substance.”

4. The inflatable resume. Some people write resumes that reflect their fantasy life rather than their history, Amtower said. Inflatable resumes inflate the gullible outsider, someone looking for a surefire way to have success in all things.

Inflatable resumes use extreme hyperbolic assertions. “You’ll believe that if you’re not associated with them right now,” Amtower quipped, “life won’t just pass you by, it’s over.”

3. Bigger is always better. Duh! “Some corporate board decides to buy up a bunch of direct marketing companies to achieve economies of scale and let its financial people run these companies,” Amtower said. “There’s a trend among many industries to do roll-ups and either devalue or kill the brand in the process. Some mergers and acquisitions activity makes sense. But other activity, especially the roll-up, doesn’t.”

Amtower cited Viking Office Products as an example, which was bought by Office Depot a few years ago and folded into the parent firm’s multichannel operations. “Do you get the same service from Viking’s parent company?” he asked. “Not likely. Institutional memory is the lifeblood of every company. You may bask in glory, but do it quickly because it won’t last.”

2. Throwing rocks in the gene pool. When the gene pool in a particular family-owned and operated business is running shallow, some owners believe it’s time to give it a boost; to entice an outsider “with a Howard Stern contract,” Amtower pointed out. “To have CEOs not from your niche, but from different industries, you get a combo of a CEO and a bling artist, who tends to offer advice in B-to-B direct marketing world that might liken to a General Electric grad running 3-M.”

CEOs brought in to run family businesses from the outside bring their own “bling” artists and gurus, “and gum up the place with ideas that don’t fit,” he said. “That only works in the gene pool if you’re working with the same species.”

1. Any mainstream media. “We’re the New York Times. We’ll only use the story that uses the preconceived ideas of direct marketing,” he said. Amtower pointed out that most mainstream publications, such as the New York Times, only write about direct marketing when direct marketers appear to be doing bad things.

For instance, he faulted the recent Times story about infoUSA CEO Vin Gupta providing free private airplane rides to the Clintons. “As if this is the only perk a politician ever got?” he asked. “The Times is scared because direct marketing is more effective than buying a newspaper or advertising on TV. It’s a matter of good info vs. bad.”