Whom the Gods Would Drive Mad They First Put in Charge of Mailing Lists

Editor's Note: The following article is adapted from Bruce Marcus's forthcoming book Professional Services Marketing 3.0.

If the computer hadn't been invented, professional services marketers would have had to invent it. We depend so much, after all, on knowledge and data, and manipulating it, and accessing it, that we couldn't get past 10 a.m. without the computer to help do it all for us.

We write and manipulate numbers for budgets and markets and surveys, and we thrive on mailing lists. We do online marketing, desktop publishing, proposals, and visual presentations. And despite the increase in Internet marketing, the direct mail letter is still an integral part of target marketing.

In contemporary marketing, in which audience definition goes so many layers deeper than it ever has before, only the computer allows the sophisticated marketer to cope with the masses of data needed to compete successfully.

Then there are mailing lists—for both hard copy and Internet marketing—which can be troublesome and difficult to tame.