I may only be 38 years old, but it’s been a long, hard 38 years full of many twists and turns. One of the most impactful twists along the way was my time as a debt collector / repo-man. That experience completely transformed the Daniel Romero the world had previously known, bringing out a side of myself I didn’t even know existed. But as much as the job changed me, I brought some things to the job that made me much more successful than your standard, run of the mill collector. And those things were born from a love of advertising. 

How I Became A Debt Collector

I got into collections completely by accident. Previously, I’d been the Inventory Manager at a Border’s bookstore, a pretty good fit for my severely introverted personality. But needing a new job amid the 2008 economic crisis, I applied for a Sales Manager position at a rent-to-own store. I figured my managerial experience from Borders combined with my sales experience from my high school eBay days (more on that later) would make me a decent fit on the sales manager front. On the first day at my new job, however, I was immediately hit by a surprise I never saw coming. 

My boss asked me to accompany her on a quick errand – no big deal, right? I got in her car, and she drove me to an absolutely terrifying part of town alongside the Hudson River in NY. She then handed me a sheet of paper with a name and an amount due to be collected, and told me to go get the money. As an extremely introverted person, just the idea of knocking on a stranger’s door sent my cortisol production into all time highs. But I had no idea what I was getting into. 

I walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell and anxiously waited. Suddenly, an absolutely massive, furious man opened the door. He cursed me out at the top of his lungs, threatened to kick my you-know-what, and slammed the door in my face. I just stood there, trying to process what just happened. Eventually, I turned around and took a stilted, still-stunned walk back to my boss’s car. “He didn’t give me the money,” I sheepishly stated. My boss, laughing uncontrollably, managed to say between the peels “that’s OK, we’ll try again tomorrow.” 

On the way back to the store, my boss explained to me that while she offered me the Sales Manager position I applied for, she felt I had what it takes to be an even better Customer Accounts Manager and was going to put me in that role instead of the role I applied for. She then explained that my primary duty as the customer accounts manager was to protect the store from financial losses – either by repossessing products from non paying customers, or by collecting their past due balances.

I never would have applied for or accepted the Customer Accounts Manager role had it been explained up front, but now I had to make a decision: do I quit, or try to make do with this new role? My immediate reaction was to quit, but I had just proposed to my now-wife, and I really needed a job. And considering the state of the economy at the time, I wasn’t sure I could even get another job if I left this one behind. I decided to stick it out, and to my shock, quickly became an excellent collector. 

So how did a shy, physically unimposing bookstore manager transition so easily into the top-performing collector in his region? By leaning heavily into my ability to read people and love of audacious, narrative-driven advertising. 

How Advertising Made Me A Better Collector

Growing up, I loved watching infomercials, listening to carnival barkers, and reading mail-order catalogs. As a child, I used to wake up at the crack of dawn so I could catch Ron Popeil’s infomercials before the scheduled programming began for the day.

I would also pour over catalogs like Sportsman’s Guide and J. Peterman, captivated by their vivid product descriptions and promises of a more adventurous life with every purchase. 

A Messaging Machine Is Born

As a teen, I launched my own eBay store using many of the techniques I’d learned from all those ads I consumed. I would write up long, boastful, ridiculous product descriptions that warned potential buyers of my products’ dangers: 

You’ll no longer be able to walk down the street in peace when you put on these second-hand Levi’s – women will be interrupting your every step trying to hand you their phone number. 

I quickly found that my absurd writeups were leading to my products routinely selling for about 20% more than the exact same product in competitive listings. My primary audience was men who wanted to feel cool, and my product descriptions promised them that’s exactly what they would be when they wore my offerings. 

What I learned from eBay was that people are driven by their most basic motivations, fears, and aspirations. Could they buy the same pair of vintage Levi’s for $20 less, one listing over? Of course – but that listing wasn’t promising their jeans would relieve you from your insecurities. 

The same thing applied in the collections world – I found that my ability to read individuals’ motivations and then “code switch” into speaking directly to their wants, worries and wins, I could get them to take the action I wanted – either paying their bill, or letting me take their merchandise back. Every individual’s motivating factors were different, and they needed those factors to be addressed in order to move forward. 

Development of Audiences & Personas

I found that the customers on my collection list broadly fell into 3 buckets: 

• Decent people who fell behind because they were really struggling to make ends meet 
• Disorganized people who just didn’t get the social contract side of needing to honor your commitments
• Creepy people who never intended to pay in the first place

Identifying these groups made it much easier to tailor my approach and communication. I found that the “decent” group was usually ashamed of falling behind, and responded well to empathetic solutions like partial payments and manageable extensions. They wanted to get out of the hole they were in, but they just didn’t know how. 

The disorganized folks tended to be more motivated by social perception – they were falling behind because the desire to look like a bigshot had them stretched too thin, and they just couldn’t manage all of their responsibilities. These individuals tended to be much more motivated by embarrassment – not many bigshots are being visited at work by a bill collector demanding payment. If you could give them a solution that still allowed them to feel like they were getting special VIP treatment (especially if it was in front of their peers – “I wanted to swing by to pick up your payment and save you the trip to the store since you’re one of our best customers…”), they were much more willing to respond favorably. 

The people who never intended to pay were the hardest group to reach, in part because they had the least consistent motivations. Some of them were just true sociopaths – good luck getting them to bend. Others might not care at all about being visited at work or being given assistance to get climb out of the hole they dug, but they might still rather give up their merchandise than have me knock on their door 2x per day for 90 days. Most people have a breaking point, and incessant knocking tends to get you there eventually. 

In all circumstances the overarching message was the same: “get your account back on track.” You could accomplish that by making a payment or giving up your merchandise, and my job was to identify which persona motivation needed to be addressed (or leaned into) in order to move the individual down the funnel into paying or returning in order to accomplish the goal of getting the account back on track. 

Crafting An Effective Message

My time as a collector profoundly shaped my perspective on brand strategy. It wasn’t good enough to just present the facts to a past-due account and expect them to take action. It also wasn’t enough to create one catch-all script to motivate everyone I was collecting from. Different people needed different messages in order to spark action. And even once I had my persona messaging pretty nailed down, it had to remain a work in progress to adapt alongside the audience as they continued to navigate new twists and turns in their own lives. 

This isn’t a scenario tied specifically to collections – this applies to consumer brands as well. People are making decisions based on specific, sometimes wildly-different personal motivations along the way to a common result (purchasing your product). It’s not good enough to have one brand-level message you force feed to all facets of your audience – people need to have their own wants and worries addressed. 

Let’s go back to bill collecting for a moment: imagine knocking on a door demanding payment for a past-due account. Would you speak the same way to a sweet elderly grandmother as to a towering, aggressive auto mechanic? Of course not. Now imagine the same exercise with your brand in place of the past-due account. Do you really think the same exact talking points will resonate the same way across audiences? 

Testing Your Message

One area where collecting door to door has some major benefits over traditional brand strategy is real-time testing. It’s easy for disconnected marketers in a corporate boardroom to come up with a bunch of motivations for fake people and answers to their fake concerns, but what happens when you trot those strategies out to real, live people? 

As a collector, I could see instantly if my messaging was missing the mark as I stood in someone’s doorway, and I could pivot in real time. If I struck a chord with that individual, I would try the same message on the next customer within the same persona, and keep adjusting as I went. Sometimes you would find that what you thought would resonate was nowhere near the message that actually resonated in the real world. That feedback loop from customers was crucial. Ultimately, I didn’t care if what I thought would work actually fell flat – as long as I found something that did work, I was going to lean into what got me results and completely forget about my preconceived notions of an effective message. 

Bringing this back around to brand strategy, that feedback loop is still absolutely crucial. You 100% need to collect feedback from the human beings who make up your audience – not just marketers who are trying to project what those real people think and feel. Use tools like customer surveys, empathy interviews, or even anecdotal reports from your sales/customer service staff on what they hear from real, live human customers on a daily basis. 

In branding, we often fall in love with our own cleverness. But the truth is, if your message isn’t landing, it doesn’t matter how good it sounds in a brainstorm. The secret sauce to brand strategy is creating relationships with human beings, and that’s very hard to do without keeping a foot firmly planted in the doorway of the real world.