Live from New Orleans: The Academic View

Posted on March 1, 2006 by Chief Marketer Staff

Direct Newsline spoke with Raymond P. Fisk, professor and chair of the Department of Marketing & Logistics at the University of New Orleans’ College of Business Administration, to get a broader view on direct marketing in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

The University of New Orleans is located on the opposite site of Orleans Parish, the whole of which is shaped like a bowl. Much of the worst flooding occurred in the well of the bowl. When Dr. Fisk gave instructions on how to get to his office, he wrote “Getting across New Orleans used to be easy, but Hurricane Katrina destroyed that, too. There are only two slivers of the city left: The sliver by the river where the oldest part of the city is located — French Quarter, etc. — and the sliver by the lake where our university is located. It is a disaster zone between the two. There are no traffic lights in most of it, just stop signs. No people either.”

This storefront is part of a strip mall in Gentilly Terrace, an area “in the bowl” about a mile away from the University of New Orleans. The graffiti indicates that the building has been overrun with cats, and asks that food be left for them. Photographs by Richard H. Levey

Direct Newsline: It is six months since the levee breechings and flooding. As reconstruction goes on, what changes are you seeing in direct response marketing activity?

Fisk: The biggest change we are seeing in New Orleans is a forced shift away from the traditional direct use of mail, the US post office. The mail service in Orleans parish is no longer anything adequate for the needs of the public. Electronic systems have been the salvation for us. I think that what will happen here is that New Orleans is accidentally becoming a test bed for more work with electronics, simply because we don’t have much choice.

The phone system was less reliable than the Internet, simply because – even though I was in a different part of the country, my [cell] phone was reacting as if I was right here in the middle of the parish because of my area code. That was happening to a lot of people all over the metropolitan area.

Direct Newsline: What about landlines?

Fisk: Landlines were gone. I still don’t have a landline at my house. BellSouth is saying it will have its system fully restored sometime in the summer. Now, my service is with Cox Communication, and they can’t even tell me when they’ll have my service restored. They have no idea. [Editor’s note: Landline service is restored in a patchwork fashion throughout Orleans parish, albeit not in Fisk’s area.]

I’ve seen studies that say people in the younger generation just don’t see the point of having a landline. Whereas people in their 50s and 60s or 70s, the probability of a land line is much higher. I think a lot of people are going to give up on landlines.

The weirdest part [regarding] BellSouth and Cox and the others is that they are making it easy for the cell phone companies to take their customers away because they can’t get their systems restored. Both of them are upgrading their systems. Well, that’s great. I think it’s nice that they are upgrading their systems. But it’s not helping me right now, and it’s not helping any of my neighbors. [The phone companies] are going to have to work very hard to try to win customers back.

Raymond P. Fisk, professor and chair of the Department of Marketing & Logistics at the University of New Orleans’ College of Business Administration

Direct Newsline: Put yourself in the position of someone in the private sector. Thinking about assembling a mailing list, targeting, segmenting and getting your message to consumers, what opportunities exist?

Fisk: Local organizations here are doing more and more to strengthen their electronic availability so they can be found if there is an evacuation, so that businesses can find their employees as well as their customers. Lots of businesses that didn’t keep those records are getting those records now. They are now starting to collect information from their customers because they realize “What if something like this could happen again?” It’s not impossible in this area.

Direct Newsline: What does this mean for the direct and database marketing savvy of local businesses?

Fisk: They have to become more sophisticated. They need not just the physical address; they need electronic communications, both phone as well as e-mail. Today’s world of e-mail communication works wonderfully versus the difficulties of trying to call somebody. The use of direct mail, because it is just isn’t going to work very well for companies here, is being forced down as a percentage of total direct marketing.

There was a restaurant not far from my house that has reopened, and they used to send me mail pieces inviting me to come out whenever they changed their menu or whenever they had a special, or whenever it was my birthday because they had collected my birth date. Well, I haven’t received a single piece of mail since the storm, and I am sure it is because of their rebuilding efforts and they simply aren’t doing that right now.

Direct Newsline: Do you see a floor in the size of the company doing this?

Fisk: I actually see two things in the floor for doing this. One would be the size of the company in terms of staff, but the other issue would be technological sophistication. My friends in the advertising industry have always been more technologically sophisticated than other. They’ve really prospered despite the storms, getting new business from out of town that they might not have otherwise gotten. To their surprise, they are getting business they didn’t necessarily chase after as much.

[On the other hand], a restaurant might have a staff of 100, but if they aren’t technologically sophisticated, they might not do it. Do they have some key staff members who are going to be able to provide local inside-the-organization technical support? A lot of businesses don’t have that – they’re lucky to do e-mail.

Direct Newsline: You’ve got a whole new group of direct marketers in New Orleans. If they’re using e-mail, how do you keep them from over saturating the market?

Fisk: This is one of the interesting issues with small companies. Small companies can only afford small mistakes. At a certain point you are risking the entire company if you make a mistake beyond a certain size as a small company. One of the things that tends to be true of small businesses is that they tend to listen to their customers more. In most small businesses the owners do have contact with the customers, and that by itself tends to reduce the risk of being out of touch.

Direct Newsline: New Orleans has gone six months without direct mail, without telemarketing. When you think about the classes your department will offer, will there be a move away from direct mail design, direct mail creative and more toward database use, analytics and e-marketing? Or, because direct mail does exist, even though it is not practiced much in New Orleans right now, will your curriculum continue to reflect it?

Fisk: Our curriculum will definitely still include all the forms of marketing from the most traditional to the newest. But it’s not that the others are disappearing, it’s that the total mix of marketing tools has increased. What I think is going to be our emphasis is the forms that are more modern, simply because each generation of customers is shifting, slowly but surely. Plus the notion of mass marketing has eroded. There is more and more interest in marketing to smaller groups, and even to individuals.

Direct Newsline: What other post Katrina shifts do you anticipate in new media use in marketing?

Fisk: I think it will be accelerated, just like the technological infrastructure is going to be accelerated. And because so much of the infrastructure was damaged – they had to put up telephone poles [the in-ground lines were destroyed when the soil was saturated for several months], and eventually do brand-new power lines, and the communication lines, the same thing. They are having to replace all the communication lines with new ones, so we’ll have some of the best infrastructure, eventually. That only increases the opportunities, when you get the bandwidth. One of the key things that has affected the Internet’s ability to do new things is increased bandwidth. We’ll have a lot more bandwidth once we get past our rebuilding pains.

Direct Newsline: Could we be looking at a “Silicon Bayou”? Is it likely that New Orleans could turn out to be a leader in this type of communication?

Fisk: Likely is hard to say. It’s possible. Right near our campus is a research park and there are software companies in there now. They are not that well known to the rest of the world, but they are actually doing some interesting work. And that was before the storm. Fortunately those locations weren’t even flooded. The harder to part to predict here is the tipping point. At what point do you have enough critical momentum that you can get to the Silicon Bayou? I don’t think it is likely to happen any sooner than in the range of five to 10 years, and that is similar to the projections people are making about the whole city [to correct all the damage.] They haven’t even gotten to the halfway point in cleaning the debris. Not even close.

Now, the infrastructure side is improving, and that will be a big issue. I mentioned that Cox and BellSouth were updating their systems. Both will have better fiber connections than ever, and that kind of connection bandwidth is critical to any kind of Silicon Bayou effort. But the part, the hardest part to get, is the brains. You’ve got to have the minds, with the right kind of technological skills, to make Silicon Bayou work. Right now it would be difficult to attract those people. Not because they might not want to be here, but where would they live? And that is the biggest problem this whole metropolitan area has right now, is housing. If you were going to try to attract more people to this Silicon Bayou, first you have to be able to tell them, “here’s a neighborhood you can live in.” And that won’t happen right away.

None of the efforts of government agencies at the city, state or federal level have been able to deal with that issue. FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] has promised our University trailers. They promised them in December.

Direct Newsline: I saw trailers as I was driving up.

Fisk: Yes, but they aren’t connected. They’re empty. The latest promise is in April. Our semester ends about two weeks after that.