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

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.