Intrusive marketing!

As a 46-year-old Indian consumer, I cannot but marvel on the sea change that has taken place in India in the past 25 years. One of my earliest memories of being a "big" buyer was in 1979 when, fresh out of university and in my first job, I obtained the "allotment" of a Bajaj scooter after having waited for a few years.

With excitement, I went to the notified dealer in Delhi and after being made to wait for several hours (without even the courtesy of a glass of water), I was condescendingly given the keys of the vehicle.

Some years later, I had to use the influence of my (late) father-in-law to get a Diners Club credit card; otherwise, even as a fast track executive in a large organisation, my financial standing did not automatically qualify me for one. Around the same time, it called for celebration when my own telephone booking matured and the instrument actually rang for the first time!

Today, it seems not even a day passes without being subjected to direct and indirect solicitation for all kinds of products, including automobiles, telephones, both fixed and mobile, and worst of all, credit cards.

Direct marketing in India is fast becoming Intrusive Marketing, and as someone recently mentioned in an international publication, "customer is no longer the king since no one harasses a real king"!

The worst offenders, in my personal experience, are the credit card issuers, including ABN Amro (which have even sent pre-embossed credit cards without even ascertaining if I need one), Citibank, and American Express (which, despite my having a range of Amex cards with gold and platinum colours, still wish to enrol me for some more).

Loyalty card offers for dining at select hospitality chains are another nuisance. One cannot open the morning newspapers these days before dusting out all kinds of inserted flyers, and one cannot any more use e-mail or the Internet without being bombarded with spam and annoying pop-ups.

On the radio channels, if one is listening to cricket commentary, as soon as a boundary is hit or a wicket falls, the very next moment an annoying advertisement comes up rather than having the commentator describe in any detail what has happened.

On the TV, I have no data readily available but it seems that the ratio of commercial time to actual programming time is steadily worsening in favour of commercial spots, leading to more channel switching, and, in many cases, an annoyance with the advertised brand.

Cell phone companies are another bunch of culprits, using the proprietary information of their customers not only for bombarding them with uncalled-for SMSs but also (apparently) sharing the customers' data base with other spammers and intruders.

As someone who claims to have built his career studying and then practising marketing, I strongly believe that such mindless mass-marketing tactics would cause more lasting damage to most of the brands/companies that choose to take this route, and in many cases, divert potential customers to look for alternative products or service providers, which can show some more discretion and respect for the targeted customer's privacy.

Direct marketing is an extremely powerful tool, and can be very successful if practised intelligently and with finesse. In today's context, the terminology becoming popular is "permission" marketing.

For example, Amex and Citibank can start by first cleaning up their own data bases and ensure that their own direct sales agents do not target their existing customers of the same product. Next, they can send out (to the same cell number as their DSAs so intrusively use to call up without bothering that the target may actually be in some other time zone in another part of the world) a polite SMS giving a brief about their product and giving a toll free number where the recipient can call back if he/she has some interest in the product being offered.

Similarly, there can be many ways in which other direct marketers and advertisers can gradually reach out to the target customer audience without causing mass irritation first.

It seems, though, that few direct marketers are pausing to review the actual long-term impact of their unsolicited effort and are perhaps just content to see short-term gains from the few new customers they may be able to acquire with this effort. It would be interesting to see how these companies/brands would fare in the coming years.

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