Today we meet Kathy Duggan-Josephs, vice president of multichannel marketing at RMI Direct Marketing, a post she has held since June 2008 when RMI acquired her firm D-J Associates, which she opened in 1981.
Her current brokerage clients include catalogers, retailers and multichannel marketers.
Before setting out on her own, she had worked in brokerage at Direct Media [now Direct Media Millard] for five years where concentrated on catalogs. Why set out on her own?
"Well, it was the wild '80s where everything was growing incredibly quickly and it just seemed like a good time and a good opportunity to build my business," she recalls.
Today's, the brokerage business is "worlds apart" from how it was in those days.
"When I started it in 1981, business was booming. It was much simpler then with so many fewer options in direct marketing," she says. "If you were putting a mailing together you would order 12-month buyers and that was it and it usually worked usually. Now there's no way you go in and put a mailing plan together without numerous selections and negotiations. Instead of 12-month buyers you're taking three-month, 75+, omit, Web-only buyers with a Zip tape and it will be modeled within the merge."
Of course the recession and other factors have affected things dramatically, she notes.
"For our clients it certainly means we've been spending more time negotiating for them and really just working toward their bottom line which makes ours better," she says. "In terms of the brokerage business it's just making sure we do all the research and gain the knowledge we need about the evolving opportunities out there for our clients."
Some of those include mobile marketing and social media.
"A number of our clients are true multichannel—they're online catalog retail and certainly mobile has become part of that," she says, noting that some mobile marketing tests right now look promising.
And social media gives marketers a great way to listen to their customer base, Duggan-Josephs notes. "It gives you a great opportunity to strengthen your brand across a huge audience."
Just the same, she thinks postal will always be around even though the U.S. Postal Service has been unkind to the industry by raising rates disproportionately, notably in 2007 before the effects of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act took hold.
"What the postal service has done to catalog postal rates is to effectively get them out of the mail—but we're going kicking and screaming," she says.
In her spare time, Duggan-Josephs enjoys spending time in the garden of her Ridgefield, CT home.
