One Year On
WHAT A RELIEF – WE’RE FINALLY IN THE YEAR 2001.
This time last year, you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing some sort of “Best-of” list, as in “The Best Doo-Wop Songs of the 20th Century,” and pundits were proclaiming the arrival of a New Age.
But now reality seems to have set in. The presidential election, the first between two baby boomers, was an international embarrassment. And now we seem to be heading toward four more years of partisan backbiting, and a possible recession (or at least an economic slowdown).
But there are compensations for a misanthrope. The Internet honchos who had no product to sell, no service to render and no skill beyond raising a first round of financing are starting new careers as doormen.
The third-tier consultants who tried to cash in on it all are in even worse shape. Whatever happened to Millennial Fever[TM]?
Actually, this sobering up started last April 14 when Wall Street realized that many Internet start-ups had no “there there,” to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
Now that this has happened, we can start again on a more realistic footing.
Wendy Riches, the head of D’Arcy Marketing Services, provided some perspective during a recent chat. What would she tell firms that are not yet online? “My advice to any company is to look at what it has got in its locker,” she said. “We often forget about the product in offers. We get carried away by being customer-centric. You can’t look at the customer without looking at the product and the brand together.”
And is digital everything? Hardly.
“The Internet is a bit like television,” Wendy added. “It’ll settle in as a part of our lives. We’ll use it for convenience, we may use it for price, but we will still want that face-to-face contact…something like field marketing could be more important in five years because people will be saying, `Hey, I don’t want to only buy stuff on the Internet. I want some contact.'”
Speaking of changes, DIRECT has a new look this month. Cathi Kroha of Crow Design, working with our senior art director Kelly Roberto, has come up with a cleaner and lighter design for the magazine.
Notice our icons – and a second table of contents page. Their purpose is to steer readers to our Web site, www.directmag.com.
In addition to our regular magazine content, which is posted every month, the DIRECT site contains a great deal of exclusive online material, including DIRECT Newsline, a daily news digest; DIRECT Listline, a daily update of list availabilities; and complete results of our annual forecast survey.
