It’s the essentials, stupid: The mailer categories that increased their direct mail budgets last year, as per the Direct Marketing Association’s 2009 Response Rate Report — healthcare (up 37%) and insurance (up 56%) — played to consumers’ instinct to circle the wagons and focus on basic household needs during recessionary times.
Similarly, massive 36% cutbacks in education mailings are also a function of the times: Who has money to invest in advanced degrees, especially in one- and no-income families? And the sharp declines in transportation and travel direct mail (59% of mailers dropping expenditures) probably reflect the summer ’08 spike in consumer fuel prices.
The trend to watch for in 2009 is how the mailer categories that kept their spending steady, neither grabbing audience share nor going into defensive mode during 2008, react. Communications and packaged goods firms led this pack.
Smart money says if the economy doesn’t experience a significant turnaround during 2009, there will be fewer fence-sitters in next year’s report.
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