International Direct Marketing

13 Pages 3239 Words

I. Introduction

Only 20 years ago, direct marketing was considered a speciality employed by book publishers, record clubs or magazine publishers seeking subscriptions. Meanwhile direct marketing has become a marketing tool utilised by more than half the U.S. Fortune 500 companies. Due to direct marketing’s success it is now the basis for various sub disciplines. Database marketing, relationship marketing, one-to-one marketing and others all offer interesting extensions and variations of direct marketing’s basic techniques. More and more companies, in Europe and the United States, are using direct marketing as one part of their overall marketing mix.
As Pat Harpell, CEO of Harpell Inc., says: “Nothing delivers measurable, quantitative results against an ever-shrinking marketing budget like direct response programs.” (www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3815/is_13_13/ai_79008982)






































II. Direct Marketing

„Direct Marketing consists of direct communications with carefully targeted individual consumers to obtain an immediate response. Thus, direct marketers communicate directly with customers, often on a one-to-one, interactive basis. They closely match their marketing offers and communications to the needs of narrowly defined segments or even individual buyers. ... They usually seek a direct, immediate, and measurable consumer response.” (Armstrong and Kotler, 2000, p.476)

Direct marketing has its beginning in the mail order business and the term ‘Direct Marketing’ was first introduced by Lester Wunderman in 1961 (Baker, 2003). Today’s trend goes towards narrow targeted or one-to-one marketing. Thus many companies are using direct marketing as a primary marketing approach or as a supplement to other approaches in order to reach targeted customers more efficiently and also to build more personal relationships with them (Armstrong and Kotler,...