"This is not a sales letter"

Been talking to some marketers recently on loyalty programmes. We all know the stats about the lower costs of keeping existing customers compared to finding new ones. So it makes sense to keep in touch with the good customers. You know, drop them a note or call and see how they are doing - make sure the brand is delivering on its promise.

I know lots of brands have CRM programmes. But how often do we try and up-sell or cross-sell in our customer letters or emails?

This is the challenge: To resist the urge to always sell them something. I'm not saying you can't sell ever. I'm presuming most brands have loads of stuff that their customers want to know about. But if you try and sell something every time you contact a customer, then it's not really a loyalty programme, is it?

It reminds me of the friend or colleague that only calls when he needs a favour. It's hard to genuinely like these people.

I appreciate that brands are dealing in transactions, not friendships. But how refreshing would it be to open an occasional letter (from a brand you buy from) that starts with "This is not a sales letter."

Want to get into marketing? Read everything.

Image courtesy of Olivander

This post is aimed at anybody trying to get into a marketing communications career.

When starting out 11 years ago in marketing, I got an initial surprise. I realised that many of the marketers I met didn't seem interested in studying the past. In learning more.

For example, I met people that considered themselves direct marketing professionals - yet had not read the books by John Caples, Claude Hopkins or even David Ogilvy. There were people responsible for online marketing who gave me blank looks when I mentioned Jakob Nielsen. I bet there are people today responsible for email marketing who had never read Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus or anything by Seth Godin.

I was surprised but pretty happy. This was a real opportunity for me. So I studied everything I could find.

Direct marketing and online marketing were the areas I was working in. So I started there. I read every book or article I could find by these guys - John Caples, Claude Hopkins, Drayton Bird, Denny Hatch, Bob Stone, Graeme McCorkell, Jay Abraham, Seth Godin, David Ogilvy, Julian L. Simon as well as others somewhat connected to the discipline like Richard Koch and Ries & Trout.

There were obvious links between direct and online marketing. Online was getting bigger, so I decided to upskill myself more. I bought some books on webdesign and usability (Steve Krug, Jakob Nielsen) and taught myself how to build and design websites using the Macromedia products Dreamweaver and Flash. And I started reading Danny Sullivan's newsletters about search engine optimisation.

Later on, I read everything I could find on advertising and brand management, from the likes of Jon Steel and John Grant to Alan Cooper and David A. Aaker.

Third hand knowledge is not a substitute for experience. But even with experience, having knowledge from others will vastly improve your decisions. And if you don't have the experience, and really want to become an expert in an area, start reading everything you can about it.

If you really want to get into marketing communication - start with the authors above. But don't limit yourself to books. Blogs, email newsletters, articles, forums. There is so much information available. Much of it is free. Email me if you want names of other good books.

Have a read of Outliers too - Malcolm Gladwell's explanation on what is required to master any given area.

Do 'curiosity' style headlines work in direct marketing?

This arrived in the mail the other week.

Clearly they are hoping I'll be intrigued enough to open the envelope and see what it is all about. I was. But then again, I look at ads way too much. But for your (normal) busy person - does this work?

John Caples in his classic 'Tested Advertising Methods' cautioned that curiosity-style headlines in ads are risky. People don't care enough. Anybody have evidence suggesting otherwise?

This DM piece is for a charity. Given most non-profits don't have buckets of spare cash hanging around, I'd hate to think they are blowing budgets on risky communication strategies.

Performance Management in practice

Anybody that has studied Southwest Airlines will know that devising a strategy can be easier than executing one. Many airlines have tried to copy Southwest. Few have succeeded. Southwest know how to execute.

I realise this piece may look like a deviation from my general posts about marketing communications. But getting high performance marketing is a team effort. You need highly motivated, talented and hard working people to deliver on any marketing strategy. It requires leadership and management.

I posted last week about performance reviews. These are critical to executing strategy. The most difficult part of performance reviews is getting the objectives right at the beginning of the year. In fairness, getting them right takes a bit of time and usually a few drafts.

I wanted to show the the process I use.

The starting place is clarifying what exactly you want done and how well you want it done. One way to figure this out is to ask yourself what would you do if it were you doing the work yourself. And to what standard would you do the work. When you know what you want, next step is to figure out an objective way to measure this performance. Involve your team member. Get very specific and agree (1) the output itself (2) how it will be measured (3) when this will be measured and (4) by who.

I'll use a typical 'Direct Marketing Exec' role as an example.

Let's say it is January and one of your team members manages your direct marketing activity. Let's assume you need 100 sales each month to hit targets. Assume also that you know from experience that your direct marketing activity needs to generate 250 sales leads each month to create these 100 sales. Finally, let's assume that you know you need to target 5,000 people each month to generate 250 leads.

Objectives for the Direct Marketing Exec might be something like this:

1. His overall objective is 100 sale a month. Often the big objectives are not fully under the control of the individual. He may be relying on the sales team to close the sales. This is why it makes sense to have a few other sub-objectives which would be fully under the individual's control. I believe it is important to include the overall objective though, as this the real output objective the business wants.
   
2. A sub-objective might be to get the actual campaign out, by a specific date each month, targeting 5,000 people.
3. Another sub-objective for him might be to drive up response rates to 7% by 31st March. So currently, 250 leads from 5,000 people is a 5% response. To meet this objective, he would need to generate 350 leads from 5,000 by 31st March.
   
4. Another sub-objective might be to drive down the cost-per-piece. So if it currently costs €3,000 to target 5,000 people, the cost-per-piece is €0.60. His objective might be to drive the cost down to €2000 per 5,000 people, costing just €0.40 per piece.
   

Direct Marketing Tips for Fundraisers

Fundraising Ireland - 66 ways

View more presentations from damianob.

Useful Direct Marketing tips presented recently by Damian from Ask Direct. His emphasis is on fundraising for non-profits. Lots of tried and tested techniques here - as well as good old fashioned commonsense (which isn't too common of course).

"Direct Response was my first love"

I started out in direct response.

Mostly because I had tiny budgets and needed to show results immediately. So I read everything I could find about direct - Drayton Bird, David Ogilvy, Graeme McCorkell, Denny Hatch, Bob Stone, John Caples, Claude Hopkins...

I admit that there was a stage where I was only interested in direct and had little patience for anything else. Since then I've grown an appreciation and a respect for 'general advertising' as David Ogilvy calls it.

However, I agree completely with him when he says that everybody involved in advertising should be skilled in the basics of direct response.

Found video via Conversation Agent

The most important word in strategy

Image courtesy of Ihtatho

If I had to name the single most powerful concept in business that I have learned, it would be 'focus'.

Al Ries and Jack Trout have been talking about focus in business for many years. Their 1986 marketing classic 'Positioning - the battle of your mind' advocates that the more narrow the brand focus is, the more likely consumers will remember what it stands for. They're clearly not fond of brand extensions - believing that brand stretching always dilutes the brand.

Al Ries later wrote another book called 'Focus - the future of your company depends upon it' with case studies on companies that lost their path once they strayed from their core business. While extreme in his views at times, Ries is onto something.

Of course, this is not new stuff.

War strategists have understood the power of focus for a long time. Ferdinand Foch, the french war strategist, said "He who defends everything, defends nothing". Carl von Clausewitz agreed - "In war, few things are as important as placing one's army so that instead of being weak in many places, it is strong in few".

Pareto, the 19 century Italian economist, discovered that 20% of our efforts deliver approximately 80% of the results. This 80/20 rule has many practical applications. For example, approx 20% of your customers deliver about 80% of your profits. This is probably the first rule that direct marketers learn.

If you're interested, Richard Koch wrote a very practical book titled 'The 80/20 Principle - the secret of achieving more with less' - not a marketing book, but has lots of business applications. And if you're involved in direct marketing, and have not already read Graeme McCorkell's 'Direct and Database Marketing' - I'd highly recommend it.

So what are the practical learning? Well, there are many. Identify the important stuff. Put most of your effort into the few things you do well. Compete in only a few places. Against only a few competitors at one time. Launch only one or two major transforming initiatives at any one time. Don't spread your budget too thin. Don't spread your team's efforts too thin. Look after your most profitable customers. And if you're advertising - just say one thing in your ad.

All sounds a bit obvious and easy.

Perhaps, but not so easy to do. Why? I think this may be because it goes against our human nature. We are opportunistic and have difficulty deciding what not to do.

I once read that the most important word in strategy is 'No'.

That aside, there is the real concern that is if we are too focused, we might miss the big picture. We miss opportunities. History is dotted with fading (or dead) companies that missed or ignored new trends and technologies to their detriment. But this should not stop us for actively choosing what to do and what not to do.

Long before Pareto, Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher, explained it simply - "A man who chases two rabbits, catches neither".

Free report - changing role of direct mail in Ireland

Amarach have published "The Future is a Conversation", a 20-page report on the changing role of direct mail in Ireland.

There are some interesting bits in it. For example, they believe younger people are receptive to direct mail and "receiving something personally addressed to you in the post is something of a novelty for the bebo generation".

I'd admit I was a bit sceptical when I saw the report was sponsored by An Post but they don't pretend that the trends are all good. One stat they share claims that only 14% feel 'positive' or 'very positive' about direct mail.

Thanks Kevin for sending on. You can download here.

Interview with Drayton Bird

I've mentioned Drayton Bird a few times on my blog. Drayton is one of a few individuals that most influenced my thinking in my marketing career.

For anybody not familiar with Mr Bird, he is best-known for his massive contribution to the discipline of Direct Marketing.

Let me give you an idea of scale here. A few years ago, I read an article in Precision Marketing, naming him as the person who has made the biggest contribution to direct marketing in the previous 15 years.

Campaign Magazine also named him one of the 50 most important individuals in UK advertising during the previous 25 years – "the only universally acknowledged point of creativity in the direct marketing world”.

So I am very grateful that he took some time out of this day to answer a few short questions for my blog....

Me: What is the single biggest change you noticed in direct marketing industry in the past 15-20 years?

Drayton: More people are doing it, less well.

Here are some of the things that have had significant effect on the marketing industry over the last four decades:

• The computer and particularly the speed with which data is available.
• Databases. Now all organisations want databases because they realise the value they hold. They have seen how easy it is to capture data via a website.
• Direct marketing attracting more investment than general advertising
• Personalisation and customisation has allowed more relevant communications to be produced.
• The decline in educational standards, especially literacy and numeracy
• The internet
• The way in which the idea of the brand has come to seem important, even to people who have nothing to do with marketing – and who misunderstand it
• Inflation, especially in media costs, where it has far outpaced general inflation, leading people to seek new ways of marketing
• The greater desire for individual expression, frustrated by the move among those in power towards ever more centralisation. This mirrors what has happened in politics – e.g. the European Union.
• Compliance – and the obfuscation of language in the pursuit of covering the corporate rump.
• Changes in attitudes to sex – greater openness, particularly in advertising imagery.
• The increasing use of marketing techniques – usually badly and often dishonestly applied – by government.

Me: There seems to be a blur between direct marketing, ATL advertising and digital marketing. Do you find this?

Drayton: Yes there is. This is a good thing. This is not a difficult business to master and people should be able to understand and practice all three, since customers switch happily between them. Customers and their motivations do not change even if the media do. Actually as I point out in the new edition of Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, the word “digital” is a misnomer. We have digital TV and radio, but marketers don’t think of them as digital.

Me: Is the future of direct marketing looking bright?

Drayton: Yes. My former colleague Shelley Lazarus, now CEO of Ogilvy Worldwide said at the DMA conference not long ago that today, all marketing is direct. This is because of the internet, which is accelerated direct marketing.

Me: What are the common mistakes made by marketers?

Drayton: Here are some I listed recently for another interview...

• Too many amateurs in a business that calls for professionalism.
• They fail to study the past – or read.
• They “seek applause instead of sales” – Claude Hopkins said that over 80 years ago.
• They forget it’s just salesmanship and imagine it’s a branch of the entertainment business. Entertain, by all means, but make sure it’s relevant.
• They invest before testing – why guess when you can know?
• They don’t measure. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. What sane person invests in anything without measuring return on investment? Marketers do every day. Why? Because firms see it as an expense, not an investment. That’s why they cut marketing expenditure in recessions.
  
• They believe research will supply the answer – when it is only indicative.
• They don’t study business as a whole - all they think about is marketing.
• They fail to explain clearly to their colleagues what they are doing – maybe because many don’t really know.
• Over-optimism and a naive belief that marketing, especially advertising will solve business problems.
• Hiring marketing directors and senior agency people without checking their credentials. There is too little due diligence in our industry.
• Uncritical acceptance of “gurus” who are often just recycling old truths. Me, for instance.

Me: What advice would you give anybody starting off in marketing?

Drayton:

• Read. It’s a very agreeable feeling when you walk into a meeting knowing more than anyone else.
• Study people. They are the only profit centre in your business. If you really understand your customers you multiply your chances of success.
• Constantly ask yourself: “What if?” - that is how ideas are born. You need an inquiring mind to succeed in this business.
  
• Take an interest in as many things as possible outside marketing, which is a very dull subject. If you think about nothing else you will end up a tremendous bore – to others and yourself.
  

Drayton is author of several excellent marketing books, including Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing and How to write sales letters that sell? and he also blogs.

Companies don't write letters. People do.

Image courtesy of LarimdaME

"A mailing with a letter, but without a brochure will almost always outpull a mailing with no letter" - Denny Hatch

Last week I wrote a short post 'Direct Marketing Tip' acknowledging the many learnings available from DM tests. While these little nuggets are widely available, I'm not sure if they are widely used. For a nice example of how not to do it, read the "Dear valued customer" letter here.

So apologies if this is old hat. But if you are new to direct marketing or have not trained in it, I'm hoping this is a useful DM tip:

If you are posting stuff to your customers - include a letter.

Not everybody will read it. But some will. Some will skip the brochure and go straight to the letter. Denny Hatch, a DM author, suggests that the letter is actually more important than the brochure. And if I had to dump one for cost reasons, I'd dump the brochure.

Of course, the brochure and the letter serve different purposes. Your brochure is often the glossy bit from your company but the letter is the personal note from you.

Also, remember that companies don't actually write letters. People do. And I'd recommend that the name at the end of the letter should be a real person's at your company. The days of putting a fake name at the end of a letter so customers can't contact you must be coming to an end.

Direct Marketing Tip

"Even if small is less beautiful, it is more efficient" - Graeme McCorkell

One of the great things about direct marketers is they test all sorts of stuff. They test offers, lists, formats, creative, media and lots more. So we have loads of learnings available.

Graeme McCorkell is a highly regarded direct marketing professional and author. The above quote refers to press advertising sizes. Tests show that smaller ads are more (cost) efficient than larger ads.

Sure, you will get higher responses if you make the ad bigger, but the additional responses will not be in proportion to the size increase. So for example, if you double the size of your ad, you won't double the number of responses.

A good rule of thumb is to expect 40% more responses if you double your ad size. But good to test for yourself.

Email marketing metrics: free report

Some new research available on email marketing metrics based on 300 million opt-in newsletters and campaigns in 2007.

There is some good stuff here. For example, the best days to send are Mondays, Tuesdays and weekends. Also, open rates are down by a couple percent, partly due to consumers opening emails on handheld devices.

There are a couple of good case studies here too worth a read (in particular the one on morebusiness.com).

Original post from Dave in Clientwell, who has also given his quick summary of it.

Download the free report from here.

The real power of one.

When advertising, a photo of somebody looking directly out of the page can increase your response rates.

This was the advice of David Ogilvy (or may have been Drayton Bird, I can't remember). Anyway, some recent fundraising research supports this.

Paul Slovic, of 'Decision Research', has demonstrated this by measuring the contribution levels from people shown pictures of starving children. Some subjects were shown a photo of a single starving child while others were shown a photo of two children.

Those shown two children donated 15% less than the one child. In a related experiment, photos showing a group of eight starving children contributed 50% less money than those shown just one. This research makes sense to me. People can relate to individuals and their stories.

The original post is here

Image courtesy of Children at Risk Foundation (CARF) - www.carfweb.net

RSS Marketing

I wonder if 'RSS Marketing' will overtake 'Email marketing' as a real marketing communications tool for brands?

I think it should.

All marketeers know the benefits of email marketing - relatively cheap, quick to deliver, often with decent click-thru rates. But the marketing guys sending out the emails are in charge - they decide when and how often they will 'target' you with their email.

Email marketing is generally a one-way communication. Usually you can't click on the reply button and email them back. I bet that most emails are signed off with a fake name. God forbid you try and contact back the people that fill up your inbox.

Unfortunately marketing people are thinking mostly about the 2% or 3% of people that respond, not so much the 97% that didn't. Sure you can unsubscribe but this can be a hassle. Instead, I personally just delete the mail.

But RSS Marketing would be very different. As any blogger knows, if you want people to read the stuff you have to say - you have to work hard. Content is king of course. You have to put the time into it. I don't think there is any substitute for time. Persuading people to subscribe to your feed is just the first step. You need to be interesting, relevant, insightful or entertaining if you want them to take time out of their day to hear what you have to say. And you have to be ready to respond to personal comments. They can unsubscribe anytime - without even telling you.

With RSS Marketing, your subscribers are clearly in charge.

How many brands and marketing teams are including RSS Marketing as an element within their communications mix?

Don't make me think.

Because I've been in so many debates about this over the years, I'm guessing others have too. It's a small thing - tactical and executional but worth getting right.

When deciding on discounts and promotional offers, don't talk in percentages - unless you really have no other way of doing so. People are busy and most do not have time to figure out percentages.

For example, I know "20% off" sounds high and the argument is that consumers may not do the maths but they appreciate or feel that this is a good deal. My view is that you are better off explaining this in real absolute amounts. So if 20% works out as €1.50, then say "€1.50 off" in your advertising or point of sale.

Just because I say it here doesn't mean it is true - instead seek out the real experts such as Drayton Bird, Bob Stone, Axel Andersson and Denny Hatch. I dug out this quote from Axel - "The only percentage most people understand is 50%, and is that case I prefer half price or buy one, get one free."

Better still - test it.

One quick and cheap way to test the way offers are communicated is to do some quick Google adword tests. You'll have enough analysis within days (or hours sometimes) to allow you to roll out the higher-pulling headline in your other media.

Finally, I once even heard a suggestion to offer a 3% discount for a consumer offering. Our group spent a few minutes trying to work out if this was good value or not...

"The most useful book about advertising that I have ever read"

I'm pretty sure I first heard about this while reading Drayton Bird's Commonsense Direct Marketing. If I remember correctly, he made that point that many marketeers are simply not trained in the basics and his advice to anybody starting out would be to read everything possible. His first book recommendations were Claude C. Hopkin's Scientific Advertising and this.

As you can probably guess by the title, this is a practical book. John explains very simply why one advertisement will outperform another. His statements are bold because they based on tests. If you don't already understand the importance of headlines, you will after this. There are three chapters (ch.2, 3 + 4) written entirely about headlines.

While this was published in 1932, it is still very, very relevant today. It has been suggested that some of his advice is not as important as as it was in the 30's. Perhaps, but I had a quick look over at amazon and wasn't surprised to see that it has a five-star rating from 42 reviews.

The copy I have has a foreword by the late great David Ogilvy. I just grabbed it off the shelf to read his quote directly - "This is, without doubt, the most useful book about advertising that I have ever read".

This is a keeper. You won't give yours away.

What about the ones that don't respond?

I seem to have a lot of conversations about typical response rates. A few things come to mind...

While typical rates are useful to know, my view on this is that it really is difficult to predict a response if you haven't tested the campaign in advance. Needless to say the response will be better if you are talking to the right people, whom ideally you have some sort of (good) relationship with, at the right time, about something they are interested in.

And while we sometimes get caught up debating what response is considered good, it is just as important to understand what response you can afford. If you're advertising expensive cars, you can probably tolerate a lower response than if you're advertising a car hire. Again, as long as it is still profitable.

On saying that, a chart like this does help predict a possible range of responses. I know many people often seem surprised how few actually click on online (display) ads - so this is good to manage expectations. I found the chart here.

Finally, in our digital age, I honestly feel it is important to think about the vast majority of people that do not respond. If the chart above is correct, and only .1% are responding to your email shot - what do the other 99.9% feel about you interrupting their day?

They may not mind if they like your brand and feel you actually thought it was relevant - but I wouldn't count on it.

Commonsense Direct Marketing

I'm planning to add lots of my favourite books to this blog over the next couple weeks. I thought I'd start with this one...

'Commonsense Direct Marketing' was one of the first direct marketing books I read. Drayton Bird is one of the most respected marketing professionals around and is responsible for igniting my interest in reading about marketing in general. It is a very practical book and covers the principles and key areas of direct marketing. What surprises me still is how much of this stuff marketing folk still don't know. It may look a bit textbook-ish from the cover but it is not. There's no bullshit here. I'd highly recommend it to anybody and everybody involved in marketing.

"We value your business"

"We value your business" - these four words appear on websites, in customer service centres, in emails and letters...and of course, while waiting on hold.

I hate these four words.

It's not the sentiment that actually bothers me. Hopefully the company does value my business and the company telling me this is about to prove it somehow. It just lacks any evidence of a human being. It is either lazy or misguided. Either way, it misses a great opportunity to show that your brand (and the people working there) have some personality.

While searching for examples of brands using these four words, I found this lovely bit of writing here from Shaun McIlrath - a creative director at Hurrell and Dawson, London. You can't argue with any of this, except to say that real direct marketing professionals (the likes of Drayton Bird and the late David Ogilvy) would never start with 'Dear Valued Customer' either. In fact, quite the opposite.

Anyway, it's so good, I've literally pasted the entire piece from Scamp's blog (well worth visiting)....

Dear Valued Blog Reader,

How does that introduction make you feel? Like a piece of shit, would be my guess. And yet, there are thousands of well-paid Direct Marketing professionals starting pieces of communication like this every day.

So, the first thing you need to know about Direct is that any advice you might get from a Direct ‘expert’ should be treated as deeply suspect.

This is how companies speak:

Dear Valued Customer.

As part of our ongoing improvement initiative we are centralising data, in order to provide a more streamlined service. We are also taking this opportunity to realign customer sales and are, therefore, in the process of updating our information. Enclosed you will find a Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire. Complete the FREEPOST form and send it back before June and you could WIN A HOLIDAY FOR TWO.

That is a real letter. From a company. It says only one thing: companies don’t give a fuck about you, they want your money and, at the end of the day, you are nothing more than a name on a list in a huge numbers game.

People, on the other hand…this is how people speak:

Dear Bob,

Since I was promoted to MD, I’ve noticed that no one tells me bad news any more. Now, I may just be paranoid, but I’m harbouring the suspicion that parts of our service aren’t as good as they could be. So, who better to ask than someone who uses it every day? Are we as good as we could be, or are there areas where we’re dodgy? Go on, give it to us right between the eyes – because, ultimately, my job depends on you being happy.

Know your audience

Just picked this up from (the legend) Drayton Bird. It's a letter sent to Procter and Gamble about their feminine products. It's PC Magazine's 2007 editors' choice for best webmail-award-winning letter.


Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your 'Always' maxi pads for over 20 years and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core or Dri-Weave absorbency, I'd probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I'd certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can't tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there's a little F-16 in my pants.

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? I'm guessing you haven't. Well, my time of the month is starting right now. As I type, I can already feel hormonal forces violently surging through my body. Just a few minutes from now, my body will adjust and I'll be transformed into what my husband likes to call 'an inbred hillbilly with knife skills.' Isn't the human body amazing?

As Brand Manager in the Feminine-Hygiene Division, you've no doubt seen quite a bit of research on what exactly happens during your customer's monthly visits from 'Aunt Flo'. Therefore, you must know about the bloating, puffiness, and cramping we endure, and about our intense mood swings, crying jags, and out-of-control behavior. You surely realize it's a tough time for most women.

The point is, sir, you of all people must realize that America is just crawling with homicidal maniacs in Capri pants... Which brings me to the reason for my letter. Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I
opened an Always maxi-pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: 'Have a Happy Period.'

Are you f------ kidding me? What I mean is, does any part of your tiny middle-manager brain really think happiness - actual smiling, laughing happiness, is possible during a menstrual period? Did anything mentioned above sound the least bit pleasurable? Well, did it, James? FYI, unless you're some kind of sick S&M freak, there will never be anything 'happy' about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Motrin and Kahlua and lock yourself in your house just so you don't march down to the local Walgreen's armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory.

For the love of God, pull your head out, man! If you have to slap amoronic message on a maxi pad, wouldn't it make more sense to say something that's actually pertinent, like 'Put down the Hammer' or 'Vehicular Manslaughter is Wrong',

Sir, please inform your Accounting Department that, effective immediately, there will be an $8 drop in monthly profits, for I have chosen to take my maxi-pad business elsewhere. And though I will certainly miss your Flex-Wings, I will not for one minute miss your brand of condescending bullshit. And that's a promise I will keep.

Always. . .

Best,
Wendi Aarons
Austin , TX
~~~~~~~~