He’s reaching out but not touching us with his healthcare speeches. Why? I think it’s because he’s applying ham-handed politics to a marketing problem.

Marketers, especially direct marketers, always start with a plan based on reality. The plan’s framework never needs to be longer than a few pages or have more than four headings: Background, Objective, Strategy and (some) Tactics.

Background (the Situation) is a list of all available relevant facts. It must be written out, passed around, examined, queried and culled of all subjective elements. A wrong step here screws up the whole operation.

There is only one genuine Objective. It must be realistically achievable, given the Background, measurable and come with a timeline and milestones. Its framers must be willing to have their feet held to the fire.

Strategy is the hard part. It is the deceptively simple statement of the breakthrough big step approach to how we are going to achieve our Objective.

Tactics are the fun part, like little children with all the fun and none of the responsibility. Most people are tactical thinkers. Planners don’t really need to think about tactics at the onset but they do need them to explain things to tactical thinkers.

Once the plan’s framework is constructed, a lot of other plans get attached to it: testing, budgets, creative, media, response management, customer service, etc.

If we ever got invited to try this on Obama’s healthcare campaign, we’d find so many huge holes that we’d automatically start from scratch.

The main problem is that the Background is disgracefully blotchy. Obama’s team, burying its collective head in the sand, flat out refuses to deal with a lot of big issues, including:
• Tort reform, health savings plans with tax deductions, interstate health insurance, catastrophe insurance, high risk pools, cost transparency;
• The public’s very real problems with unions and lawyers;
• The public’s reluctance to cede control of their lives to government;
• Perception that government-run health care is a nightmare wherever it’s been tried;
• Perception that Medicare and Medicaid are nightmares;
• The astonishing negatives of creatures like Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, SEIU, Frank, Durbin, Sanders, etc., etc., etc.;
• Why the people, including nearly all representatives and senators, can’t be allowed to read the bill. (Pelosi actually said that we have to pass it so we can see what’s in it. How’s that for planning?)

• Why the rush;
• Some kind of acknowledgement that the great mass of American citizens is the only real stakeholder;
• How we will pay for all this;
• That prickly Constitution;

• Where they got the idea that we’d fall for the 10-years-of-taxes, 6-years-of-benefits scam;
• Our aversion to paying for illegal immigrants, an apparently eternally renewable resource, and having them swamp the system;
• The lack of a sound principle outlining the parameters of saving money and improving access;
• An explanation of what, specifically, is wrong with our current system;
• Justifying the odd notion that in order to fix parts of the system it is necessary to tear it down;
• Challenges that “Doing something” is not an Objective, not a strategic statement, not even a tactic. It is merely nonsense, noise.

Because there’s no honest, fact-based Background, there’s no clearly achievable Objective. Beyond a pathetic list of vague feel-good wishes, there’s nothing.

Strategically, Obama, the front man, finds himself tied in knots. He has nothing to say for the simple reason that he hasn’t thought the whole thing through. He does not know what he is talking about.

Most important, he has no idea where he (and, sadly, we) will wind up with this. And there’s no way to measure progress, or lack of it.

Obama is wandering down the political path with a practical real life issue that matters tremendously to 330 million people. We need straight talk and substance. We’re not getting either. Instead this politician wastes our time while he scalds insurance companies relentlessly and speaks to us as if we are idiots. We’re just not getting it, he insists, sounding like an exasperated third grade teacher and making us more angry every day.

Marketers could help him get his healthcare plan across and rescue his nose-diving approval rating. We’d start with reality.

But he wouldn’t let us. He knows now that he has seriously blundered and he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever own up to that. All he can do is talk through his hat and bully the idiots, that’s us, who don’t share his vision.

He knows that reality would kill his plan in its nest.

Another take. This essay is based on the premise that our President and his gang actually care about health care. They don’t. And they are not bumbling planners. They may, in fact, be planning geniuses. Their goal is to micro-manage every element of American lives. Once they get this monster through, they’ll do cap-and-trade and then they’ll be in command of everything and we’ll be toast.

The other day I was reading about the Edsel debacle when this line from a 1957 Ford brochure leaped off the page: “… gearshift buttons sensibly located in the steering wheel hub.”

Sensible? Anybody who’s ever driven a car, never mind designed one, knows that gear buttons are anything but sensible and, if they were, putting them in the center of the steering wheel is imbecilic.

Yesterday I noticed an online AT&T ad with the headline: “A first impression only happens once.” It’s badly phrased, of course; only is a tricky word.

Worse, though, is that it’s a bland statement of the obvious. It’s not a lie like the Edsel line. It’s the opposite, an axiom, so fundamental that there’s no support required or available.

This genre of unsupported and unsupportable statements first came to my attention about 25 years ago in Toronto when the city decided to spend a bundle advertising a program called “Bicycles Belong.” New York City has a program like that now. So do Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

If bicycles belong, the obvious question is Where do they belong? Flat statement people aren’t good at answering questions, so you dig. I dug.

The answer, apparently, is that bicycles belong everywhere, not just on suburban side roads and leafy lanes in Cape Cod, but out on city streets with trucks and cars and buses. It’s a feel good bromide related somehow to the notion of replacing cars with bicycles and thereby saving the planet.

My bicycle-riding 6-year old nephew could demolish the idea before breakfast.

Bicycles add nothing to the economy, a few retail jobs and that’s it.
You don’t have to take a course or get a pedaller’s license to ride a bicycle on the street with the big boys. You don’t need insurance.

Bicycles are lousy at night, hideous in the rain, not so hot on cobblestones and potholes and railroad/streetcar tracks, ridiculous in the snow, suicidal on ice.

Far too many bicycle riders zoom along sidewalks, hang on to speeding city buses, go through stop signs and red lights, tow their babies in little trailers through city traffic.

You can’t bring your shopping home on a bicycle. You can’t rush a birthing momma or an infirm Grandma to the hospital on a bicycle. You can’t take the family skiing or to the beach on a bicycle and you can’t go very far anyway. You freeze in the winter and sweat like a basketball player in the summer. Bicycles are easy to steal and their riders are easy to mug.

Bicycles are on the road by sufferance. You pedal at your own risk and, when you do, you are a pain in the ass to sane citizens.

“Bicycles Belong” reminds me of the J&R ad in NYC papers after a certain election. The headline was the whole ad. It read “Change is Good.”

Unsupported and unsupportable, hence the simple and profoundly stupid statement.

The cool thing is that we catch on quickly, just not quickly enough sometimes, especially in the case of that certain election.

Takeaway? Never say anything in an ad you can’t back up.

Check out the line under the guy’s name on the card showing through the window. “Helped save 2 children’s lives since 2007.” How’s that for making a strong, accurate and super-involving connection with your donors?

The back of the envelope has a line almost as powerful but in another arena: “100% of your donation goes toward programs – 0% goes toward overhead.”

The SmileTrain is a great organization and everything they do shows it.

I have a personal official secrets act that won’t let me mention details of weird business experiences for 10 years and I’ve been dying to talk about this one.

We were still in New York and a big ad agency needed help with a DM program for a national stock broker client. The client had already tried, and missed, attracting investors with $500,000 or more in liquid assets. The portfolio management service they were offering was fee- not commission-based. The fee was 1.5% a year.

That means the minimum annual revenue (1.5% of $500,000) was $7,500 per customer. We came up with a multi-panel test: lists of course, 5 letters, 5 different markets, premium/no premium (they’d never offered one), brochure/no brochure, stamp on BRE/indicia on BRE, etc. etc.

Pretty soon, we had enough results to analyze and they were great: 0.8% response with a 40% conversion for an overall 0.32% sign up.

Sound pretty low? Well, we’d mailed about 125,000 pieces. 0.32% of 125,000 is 400. 400 x $7,500 = $3,000,000. The total cost of the mailing, all in, was about $200,000.

ROI was more than good. Right. Off. The. Bat.

But wait. There’s more.

Even assuming 50% lapses a year – 400 to 200 to 100 – the revenue over three years would be $3,000,000 + $1,500,000 + $750,000 = $5,250,000! Minimum!

And this had been a test, a lot of tests all at once. Now we would build on winners and drop losers. We fiddled around analyzing test cell results, extrapolating this and that. If we stroked all the right factors and kept testing, we had a great shot at getting the response up to 3.7% and of converting 50%.

We had discovered a goldmine.
We put together a PowerPoint show and raced over to a scowling panel of clients who had no interest in anything we had to say. They’d been studying up and knew that the normal response rate was 1% to 2%. “You didn’t even get 1%. Thank you for trying.”

And don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

I burst out laughing on the way back to Manhattan. These people were supposed to be financial advisors.

Fact is, there is no such thing as an across-the-board normal response rate, especially when your target is very wealthy.

After you do the math, plain old-fashioned mail order math, you realize there is a response you must get to make a profit. And, depending on a lot of factors, it could be anything. The main points are dollars out, dollars in, improving every time you mail and, most of all, getting and keeping customers. Percentage is a handy quick tool but essentially irrelevant.

The most valuable thing you get from testing is knowledge and I am grateful to clients for providing the opportunities to learn.