Finding good in the bad

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 1991 by Susan Hovey

NEW YORK CITY-Take a closer look at your file. Those bad names may not be as bad as you think.

"Those magazines that automatically run their bad debt files through a suppression can be knocking out a substantive portion of their potential universe," cautions Janice Brandt, vice president of advertising for Field Publications.

"We have a tendency to look at these people as freeloaders, as opposed to a group with a lot of different reasons why they end up on the bad credit list. Most people enter transactions in good faith."

Brandt recommends that publishers re-examine their bad debt files and find ways to construct some different offers. "I've always been of the mind that a billing series should be appropriately strong; I wasn't afraid of offending a deadbeat," she saYs. "But in this kind of climate, you have to rethink that attitude. Unless you have the most impeccable customer service in the world, then you probably have some customers in there who are bad-debted because they are sick and tired of trying to straighten out their account."

Field, which specializes in children's titles, solicits potential customers when "they are starting out with a new family," Brandt says. "Often, that's a time when they are incurring a lot of debt. As they pass through that period, they become more stable. So, their situation from when their kid is two is a lot different from when the kid is seven."

Brandt urges publishers to view every billing, renewal and collection effort as a promotion letter. She adds that she has seen segmentation and regression analysis techniques improve pay-up by as much as 10 percent. "It is formidable, but by no means impossible."-S.H.