LESTER WUNDERMAN: SECOND ACT

Since leaving Wunderman Cato Johnson a year ago at age 77, Lester Wunderman has-as he has done many times before-reinvented himself.

Wunderman no longer runs a mega-agency with thousands of employees and a blue-chip client roster. But he is actively trying to lead his fellow marketers (and everyone else, for that matter) into the new millennium.

For starters, he’s writing a book. He’s also serving as a consultant. In addition, he teaches a class at New York University, and he gives speeches to selected audiences (like the one he will be giving at CADM).

And he is trying to do for himself and some partners what he has done for so many clients-create a direct marketing business.

Start a business?

Yes. Since last summer, Wunderman has been working with partners-experienced people unknown in the advertising world, he says-to develop a revolutionary marketing enterprise. He has invested some of his own money, and at deadline he planned to seek additional capital, though he won’t run the business on a day-to-day basis himself.

Just what can we expect from the man who helped put Columbia House and American Express on the map?

He won’t say what it is, but hints that the firm will be marketing products (our guess is commodities) through all media, particularly online.

“It’s the natural result of everything I’ve done,” he says. “If I can even begin to be right, it could change the way America ships.”

Why bother when he has already left more of a mark than most men or women will ever make? (He is maybe one of two people listed in both the Advertising and Direct Marketing Halls of Fame.)

Because it’s a problem waiting to be solved. And, as he says half-jokingly, “I don’t own Y&R [WCJ’s parent company] stock. I haven’t benefitted from the public issue. People think I’m rich or retired, and I’m neither.”

This new venture is not the only item on the Wunderman agenda. He also is a consultant with the Mitchel Madison Group, a consultancy with 15 offices and 800 consultants. Among other things, he is trying to create a lab to experiment with everything from distribution channels to strategic pricing.

“Companies spend a heavy percentage of their income against technological research on how to improve the product, but not enough on how to better market,” he says.

Why couldn’t he have done the same thing back at Wunderman Cato Johnson, the agency he founded? Overhead, for one.

“This is better for experimental stuff,” he says. “You don’t need the army ants.”

Anyway, he adds, “I know of no agencies that can afford the level of intelligence and intellect you find here. I have to be at my best.”

Another problem is that agencies tend to think more in terms of strategy and less on tactics. (One reflection on his accomplishments at WCJ: “I and the people I worked with expanded the definition of direct marketing, and never made the error of calling the agency Y&R Direct, or WCJ Direct. We didn’t restrain the definitions.”)

Though freed from WCJ only last year, Wunderman has already given considerable thought to our creaky selling and distribution system. He thinks, for one thing, that there are too many products being offered to too many people in the wrong places.

“Why have stores with 25,000 SKUs?” he asks. “Your shopping list has 15 to 20-it maxes out at 40. Yours and others’ might add up to 25,000 SKUs, but it’s inconvenient to all. We don’t know which to make convenient to you.”

Another problem is that there are too many layers of distribution.

“As a result of the industrial revolution, we still distribute mass things through intermediaries,” he says. “But things are changing in what I call the Post Present. Products are more diverse. Pricing is variable. Channels are more complex.”

As he said in a speech to the Direct Marketing Association of Washington last October: “Single channel marketing must become multichannel and holistic. Products must be made available wherever the consumer wants to buy them.”

Then there’s the issue of pricing.

“Why do people have to pay the same price for the same thing?” he asks. “Why can’t you price based on the value of what you’re selling to them?”

We have a question of our own: How is a man who is way past retirement age able to conceptualize all this futuristic stuff?

Because after a lifetime of productive work, Wunderman now finds himself totally engaged.

Isn’t that a contradiction?

No, because “most people are employed and not engaged,” he says. “Organizing the work of others is a form of disengagement.”

Which brings us to his next book, which is still at the outline stage. Except for the final chapter, his last volume, Being Direct, dealt with the past.

“We wanted to get down for the record the things we invented,” he says. “It represents our thinking with clients, but not the thousands of hours of speculating, and ideas that didn’t get bought or said. We can venture into hypothesis or experience.”

The new book will do all that. At the same time, it will chronicle-in diary form-what Wunderman has experienced on the path to re-engagement, and how it’s making his second life better than his first.

One thing’s for sure: You can’t solve problems like the ones he’s now tackling when you’re locked into the past.

“Picasso knew that,” he says. “Buckminster Fuller knew it. I find it strange that people think there’s a chronological curve to creativity.”

Not for this man. It may be his greatest contribution.