Unique Original Articles » The Closest Thing Yet To Faultless Marketing?

Direct marketing now attracts as a large amount of investment as advertising in numerous markets. There are three rationales, all straightforward.

First, you can evaluate your outcome, and as competition grows to be aggressive, many organizations enjoy it. Second, it is perfect for retaining customers; and holding on to clients is many times more profitable than getting hold of them. Third, all dealings on the fastest growing channel in the world – the internet – are direct, and the same techniques and rules apply.

But there is a further reason; and it is one that, oddly enough, came to me on my last trip to India, and which I said for the first time ever during a speech in Bangalore.

Direct marketing is the closest thing yet to faultless marketing. Quite a claim, so allow me to clarify.

What is marketing?

Marketing is classified by the British Chartered Institute of Marketing as: "Identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably".

There is an alternative, succinct definition I prefer. It was given by an American millionaire many years ago who said: "Find out what people want and need, and give it to them - and you’ll get rich".

Peter Drucker wrote that the purpose of marketing is to “know and understand the customer so well that the product fits him and sells itself.” This is, if you agree with him, perfect marketing. And it is what direct marketing does better than any other method.

First by means of the use of postal, telephone and internet questionnaires it establishes very cheaply what people say they desire, though as we all see, research is very unsound.

But then it ascertains very plainly the answer to a much more important matter: will they buy it? And it does so by requesting them to do so. As my old boss
David Ogilvy put it, “General advertisers can only guess. Direct marketers know.”

As a result of this I can tell you the answers to all sorts of fascinating queries. Like what happens if you run long copy rather than short copy. What transpires if you place someone’s face in an advertisement. How long you ought to have a phone number on the screen if you want to get the largest number of enquiries. Where your headline is most likely to get read – and so on.

The perfect advertisement

Peter Drucker also said, “The perfect advertisement is one of which the reader can say, ‘This is for me, and me alone.’” By distinction, then, no mass advertisement can be perfect; but one which is directed to individuals through direct mail or e-mail could be.

A good number of you reading this are, I assume, advertising people, and if you are akin to your colleagues elsewhere, feel you are at the hub of the marketing universe. As the saying goes, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

But advertising is only one branch of marketing and, I would recommend, not always the most significant. Product development and pricing frequently play a much larger part.

Your idea that advertising is the best answer to most marketing problems, allied to a commendable aspiration to stop customers spending money on anything else is a chief reason why they have taken so much time to adopt direct marketing.

Surely every major advertising group in the world understands the value of direct marketing and has a division taking care of it. They sometimes call it other things, like Customer Relationship Management, or Dialogue Marketing, but these are all little more than prettied-up direct marketing.

More to the point, not only customers understand cash; the big advertising groups do, too; and direct marketing agencies, regardless of what you label them, are far more lucrative than ad agencies.

So it is worth pondering that the light at the end of the advertising tunnel may well be that of an oncoming train called direct marketing. You can get run over, get out of the way, or get on board: but anything you do, don’t overlook it.

Drayton Bird has long been one of direct marketing's best known teachers and authorities. The Chartered Institute of Marketing named him, with others such as Tom Peters, Ted Levitt and Philip Kotler, one of the 50 individuals who have shaped modern marketing. David Ogilvy once said, "Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world." Find out more at http://directmarketingcourse.com
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