Dear Johnnie Boden,
Your fashion empire is one of the Top Five Brands I Want to Work On, but mainly because your DM strategy seems to be a bit flawed, at least from a customer’s point of view.
In the past 12 months I’ve bought three items from you, which hardly makes me a Top Customer and yet you keep mailing me with the determination of a love-sick spurned suitor.
I rang the nice lady in Customer Services to ask if it was really necessary to send me a new catalogue every fortnight and it turned out I was on your database three times. Perhaps I can introduce you to a nice DM agency that knows how to de-dupe lists?
Then yesterday you sent me a newspaper. Normally this would be A Good Thing, as thanks to Newspaper Club newspapers from brands can be funky short-run (cheap!) things that make your customers feel all special and loved with unique, added-value content. But this was effectively a 48 page catalogue, printed on newspaper. Not unlike the not-printed-on-newspaper catalogue you sent me a fortnight ago.
You also sent me menswear, teenswear and kidswear catalogue-newspapers. Since I have neither husband nor children (and you should at least know about the kids as I asked the nice Customer Services lady to take me off your Mini Boden database too) this seems like a waste of trees.
I do like your lovely cardis and comfy PJs. But do you think you could get a bit better at not telling me about them so often please?
Yours,
a loyal-ish but exasperated customer. xxx
PS you already know how I feel about you flashing your best offers at Brand New Customers Only. Having a better offer fall out of my Amazon package than you just emailed me as a customer is taking the p*ss.
UPDATE, 23/03/11. Just got a nice email from Leo-the-email-team-leader at Boden. He says he’s ‘adjusted my account settings’ so I’ll only get one catalogue a season and ‘if you ever receive a better offer than one you have recently used (say within 7 days) we will always refund the difference so that you are not worse off’. He also ‘hopes that you will continue to enjoy our clothes, and that you appreciate the less frequent trips to the recycling bin!’. So they’re listening!
