The Direct Marketing Educational Foundation (DMEF) has selected Marjorie Kalter to receive its 2010 Edward N. Mayer, Jr. Award for Education Leadership. Kalter is the academic program director and clinical professor for the Master of Science Program in Integrated Marketing at New York University.
The Mayer Award honors individuals who demonstrate personal commitment to helping create programs, concepts, teaching methods or materials for the instruction of college students or professors in the field of direct marketing.
In 2004, Kalter was awarded the DMEF’s Outstanding Educator award. She is a member of the board of directors for the DMEF and the Direct Marketing Association’s ECHO Committee, and chairman of the DMA Hall of Fame Committee.
Kalter spoke with Direct Newsline about her path to academia, the influence Lester Wunderman had on her career, and the value of integrated marketing.
Direct Newsline: You’re teaching now. Why leave industry for academia?
Kalter: While I was at Wunderman I was invited to teach as an adjunct in the MBA program at Columbia University. I taught an MBA seminar in direct marketing, which morphed into digital marketing as the Internet developed. I did that for nine years while at Wunderman. When I left Wunderman in 1999, NYU invited me to come and teach as a full-time faculty member, and to head the MS program in direct and interactive marketing.
Direct Newsline: Talk about your PhD thesis.
Kalter: It’s in comparative literature, not business. I changed my career when I went to a Wharton school program for people with PhDs making the transition from humanities to business. What you take from literature is insights into people and how they behave. As a marketer, you need to understand your target audience.
Direct Newsline: What is the most valuable lesson carried over from your agency time to your academia time?
Kalter: Lester Wunderman was my mentor, and he is a previous recipient of this award. I learned classic direct marketing from people like him. That’s something I have shared with students over the past 19 years: How to acquire customers measurable, how to retain customers and how to increase customers lifetime value. [At Wunderman] we were exposed to TV campaigns and consumer packaged goods marketing.
Working on the Gevalia account was the experience of a lifetime. It was, and still is, the only packaged goods product to be sold successfully through classic DM. Continuity program of a commodity product. Coffee. It was the interaction of direct marketing with packaged goods.
Additionally, I learned to think strategically, to anticipate trends, to separate fads from trends, to look ahead and see what is going to be important to a client’s business. In the classroom I often tell students that if they understand a company’s profit and loss statements they will understand why, if they work at an agency, the client says no to something they propose.
You need to understand the numbers in the business of marketing in order to know which ideas are affordable and which are risky but will result in rewards. And I think when you work in an agency, and are a part of a team of account managers and planners and creatives, then you learn to think about a business holistically. And I try to bring that to my students in the classroom.
Direct Newsline: You’ve done a lot of thinking about brand’s intersection with direct marketing. What are some long-held truths which still apply, and what are your latest thoughts?
Kalter: When I came to NYU and began teaching marketing there, I saw there was an interest in the part of students in branding, and in brand management. The Internet changed everything. The Internet invited the customer in, in the way that direct marketers had always fantasized about. The Internet made it inevitable to have one to one. That began with e-commerce and it has accelerated with social media. The classic DM world has changed because the impact of the Internet. All marketers need to use the best practices of classic direct marketing so that campaigns can be measurable.
What we are teaching at NYU is classic integrated marketing. The definition of that is marketing as a core business process that enables a company to achieve its strategies for growth. If you teach integrated marketing, you have to teach finance, management. Business subjects. And that is a different kind of integration—consistency among channels, retail and digital, direct and brand, that we don’t always see. And I think we will see it increasingly because of social media. Companies are going to be forced into total consistency across channels because consumers comment on what they see to each other.
Direct Newsline: How hard is it as an academic, out of the industrial world, to stay atop current practices?
Kalter: You learn how to stay current because you have to do that for clients— to anticipate trends, read research reports, and look across the horizon of business and understand what will impact a company’s brands and products and services. One of the things I do is I stay active with organizations like the DMA, and the DMEF. I am on the board of governors for the Echo awards. I can see all the latest campaigns, and I speak at DMA conferences so I can get feedback. I read a lot. And I talk to everybody I can to find out what’s new and what’s next.
Direct Newsline: If you could design your dream class, what would it be?
Kalter: I don’t think it really matters too much, when you have been teaching for a long time, what the subject is. That is, what the title of the course is. I think what matters, for the kind of program that I lead at NYU, is that you share your expertise, your experience and your knowledge. I try to do that in every course. If I had one last semester, one of the courses I teach is called Capstone. That is our thesis class. Every student has to take it to graduate. In that class, I teach students how to create a new company and they write a complete business plan. When you teach something like the business plan, you have the opportunity to share everything you know from strategic planning to competitive analysis and brand strategy and acquisition planning and testing and cross-channel communication. That’s a dream course for someone who has had a career in direct marketing and teaches.
