Create new customer value metrics

Profit from your deep dive into email marketing to creatively concoct new measurement criteria that will pave the way to measuring your social media. Two concepts to keep in mind: influence - how many people does a consumer reach and what impact does she have with them, and participation - how does a consumer interact (with the brand and with other consumers) and how often. Suggestions to begin your thinking: number of emails forwarded, quantity of friends recommended, feedback given, number of product reviews or recipes contributed, number of polls participated in.

Bewley featured in Business Week article about Harvard Business School PLD

HARVARD

For decades, Harvard Business School was the king of executive education. Particularly popular in management circles was HBS's noncredit "open enrollment" program. If a manager needed a quick refresher on a single, focused topic in, say, ethics, HBS was the first choice. And if an executive needed more than a crash course, the school offered a longer, more comprehensive option focused on management development and aimed at mid- to high-level employees without MBAs. The format served the school well for half a century.

But the B-school began to hear rumblings from corporate clients about what they deemed serious flaws in the program's design. First, the 8 to 12 weeks participants spent on campus was too long for them to be away from their jobs. Second, the school didn't attract enough applicants who were on the corporate fast track—the kind of people who would make good networking and brainstorming candidates. "There was a gap in what we were offering," says W. Earl Sasser, a veteran HBS management professor. So Sasser and his team rebuilt the program.

The result is called the Program for Leadership Development (PLD). It was designed to provide the best HBS has to offer—top professors, lots of case studies, and plenty of networking opportunities—without being too onerous for full-time employees.

For starters, the school toughened admissions criteria to ensure that classes include a range of talented and experienced people. Now attendees have as much as 15 years' working experience and many already hold MBAs.

Then Sasser & Co. expanded the length of the program, from 12 weeks to six months, while minimizing time on campus. Instead of three months in the classroom, PLD participants spend a pair of two-week sessions in Cambridge. Of course, reducing the amount of time spent on campus means the classroom intensity goes up several orders of magnitude. In their first two weeks on campus, PLD students cover 19 case studies. "We give the MBAs four times as long to cover the same amount of material," says Das Narayandas, the program's co-chief. "It's like trying to drink from a fire hose." To make the load more manageable, the school has designed the curriculum so each professor's teaching builds on classes that came before.

Before coming to campus, participants complete Web-based tutorials to develop basic skills in areas like accounting and finance. After their first two weeks on campus, they return home and engage in an intense business simulation that unfolds over six weeks. Each team of six or seven students launches a virtual company in one industry. The teams compete against each other for market share and revenue, and are asked to analyze all aspects of the business, from marketing and accounting to strategy and product assortment—all topics covered in their studies. Each of the six weeks represents one year in the company's life. After each week, the group must decide how their company will proceed into the next year and so on.

HBS says its new program has much more in common with full-time MBA programs than with anything currently bearing the "executive education" label, both in design and class makeup. The school has put increasing emphasis on networking. While on campus for their two weeks, students stay in small, single dorm rooms that are linked by a common den-like gathering space to encourage socialization and teamwork. As a result, the school says, participants build relationships typically found in full-time MBA programs, bouncing around ideas and concepts, and carrying their discussions off-campus.

J. Patrick Bewley, who works full-time at a small San Ramos (Calif.) marketing firm, says he has been putting in 18-hour days since starting the program in mid-October. "I learn as much from my classmates as I do the professors," he says. A telling statement, since the program has mustered some of Harvard's top professors, among them Robert Kaplan and Clay Christensen. "The Harvard program was everything I was looking for," says Bewley, 32.

Legislation regarding direct mail

In the United States, the United States Postal Service maintains that direct marketers pay the majority of the costs of mail[citation needed]. Bulk mail thereby subsidizes low cost stamps for letter, magazine, and book mailing. However, no such compensatory relationship exists with e-mail or faxes, which require the receiver to pay for bandwidth, storage space, or paper and toner, and some of the solutions to e-mail spam in the United States have involved instituting a freight cost on mass e-mail to make it productive. Such solutions have not been universally lauded, as they leave the recipients of unsolicited e-mail with the problem of storage and bandwidth consumption and would increase costs to companies that send only solicited mass mailings.

In response to a US Supreme Court Ruling (Rowan v. United States Post Office), the United States Postal Service offers a form called a Prohibitory Order (also known as Form 1500). The Prohibitory Order gives consumers the power to stop non-governmental organizations from sending them mail, and to demand such organization remove the consumer's information from their databases.

The United States telemarketing industry was affected by a national do-not-call list, which went into effect on October 1, 2003. Under the law, it is illegal for telemarketers to call anyone who has registered themselves on the list. After the list had operated for one year, over 62 million people had signed up [4]. The telemarketing industry opposed the creation of the list, but most telemarketers have complied with the law and refrained from calling people who are on the list.

Canada has passed legislation to create a similar Do Not Call List. In other countries it is voluntary, such as the New Zealand Name Removal Service.

Recent changes in direct mail technology

Advances in computing and communications technology have significantly impacted the direct mailing industry in recent years. As computers become more powerful and databases become larger, new opportunities arise for direct mail companies to perform more in-depth processing of their mailing lists. Mailings can be targeted based on location and demographic data. This allows mailings to be targeted more specifically and potentially increases response rates. Web sites are appearing which allow clients to create their mailing lists interactively using map-based interfaces.

Going Green and Direct Mail

Many consumers, as well as environmental protection groups, are concerned about the environmental impact generated by junk mail. According to 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth:

-Each year, 100 million trees are used to produce junk mail.
-250,000 homes could be heated with one day's supply of junk mail.
-Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. [3]
-The yearly production and disposal of junk mail consumes more energy than 2.8 million cars.