Companies that view direct marketing as a tactic, one under the control of their advertising departments, are dooming their programs to failure. Firms that view it on equal footing with sales, advertising, public relations and sales promotion activities may upset traditional organization charts, but their efforts will be more successful.
“Direct marketing can only exist if it is applied as a strategy, not a tactic,” said Meisner Direct’s Chet Meisner. The place for company direct marketing experts is not in a box in the organizational flow chart under the senior vp of advertising or even the chief marketing officer, but rather in the boardroom.
By taking a horizontal view, all five promotional disciplines are freed up to use all mediums, whether newspapers, television, radio, the Internet, telephones and mail, Meisner said. Merely because public relations (or any other function) uses any or all of these mediums, or targeting, segmentation or even database construction, its efforts should not be confused with DM efforts.
So what is direct marketing? Meisner believes it exists solely to sell to an individual who is looking to buy. It should not waste time with brand building, relationship generation, or information dissemination. At its purest, it should move the customer closer to a sale without requiring a face-to-face salesperson.
(Meisner is a man of many bugaboos. In addition to pulling direct marketing out from under the advertising umbrella, he’d like to see the industry abandon the term “direct mail.” What, he asks, is indirect mail? And the phrase “interactive marketing” has been hijacked by electronic mediums, he claims. Other channels are as interactive; they’re just not wired.)
Meisner spoke at a session during the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference in Atlanta.
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