The Shell Cross Sell

Shell service station. Pre-dates dad's real vision of service
Old school Shell service station with the slogan, “Service is Our Business”

The bias ply tires of the Ford LTD Country Squire skidded to a halt and our collective heads shot forward.  Wow!  When I think about it now seatbelts were those things you shoved underneath the seat to prevent one’s butt from being chafed on the white metal buckles.  Circa 1973 and the smell of Erinmore Mixture tobacco is in the air courtesy of my dad, Mr. Donald Keyes, and his Peterson pipe. Between a bellow of smoke, he announces…

Boys, I gotta show you something!

Driving around with my dad was always a weekend treat between my siblings and me.  (And a well-deserved break for my mom)  Dad would take us to mysterious places like junk stores, art galleries, places other kids wouldn’t visit until much later in life.  But now there was a mystery hiding in plain sight about to be exposed.

See there… see that Shell station.  It’s not just about gas anymore, boys!

And so begins one of my earliest lessons in marketing: the cross sell.

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My Dad’s Lettershop

Mr. Donald Keyes
My dad, Mr. Donald Keyes

In 1954, Peter Drucker wrote in his seminal work, The Practice of Management,

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.[1]

This statement served to elevate the role of the modern professional marketer – including my own father who has lived by this statement most of his professional career.

I was looking for some files on my hard drive and stumbled upon a document concerning my father, a direct response marketing practitioner since 1972.  In it was an idea to commemorate my father’s work in the field of direct response marketing.  It was also an idea to pay homage to a man who got into the business when there weren’t many formal marketing degrees in academia let alone documented work in the field of direct marketing (which was called direct mail back in his day).

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