"We are all direct marketers now, whether we know it or not," states Michelle Tiletnick, research manager of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to conclude the executive summary of the DMA's new 78-page qualitative report, “Future of Direct Marketing.”
The DMA’s first ever “Future” report details trends in direct marketing for the next 5 and 10 years, as well as how it will get there. The report contains insights from 35 direct marketing leaders, such as Herschell Gordon Lewis of Lewis Enterprises; Alan Moss of Google; Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio; and Akira Oka of Direct Marketing Japan Inc.
The experts were asked specific questions with the most interesting being: “Where do you think direct marketing will be in five and ten years?”
• Customers will be in control. If you don’t give them what they want, one of your competitors will.
• Measurable and accountable marketing will increase because with the economy, companies can’t afford to use marketing strategies that may not work.
• Traditional direct marketing (mail, catalogs) will decrease while digital marketing rises.
• Marketers will increase the use of multiple channels--but will communicate a single message.
And how will marketers prepare for all of these changes?
• Invest in the future (use technology to capitalize on data digital channels offer)
• Ask customers for their media preferences
• Test everything
• Be open-minded
The experts also weighed in on 19 industry categories, including:
• Social media: “As social and mobile channels develop, the metrics and analytics available will become more useful to brand and merchandising managers alike. Rather than simple volumetric measurements (how many people saw our YouTube ‘viral’ video, or ‘friended’ us on Facebook?), you can anticipate learning about how influence spreads through a network, and across channels,” states analytics expert “Wandering” Dave Rhee.
• Email: Jordan Cohen, senior director, industry relations for Goodmail Systems, predicts the reinvention of email as a an app that is “able to support all the functionality of a website [streaming video, rich media graphics, one-click shopping, one-click bill pay and more] with the added bonus of being able to push the content to an audience of opt-in recipients.”
• Print Catalog/retail: “Traditional retailers will become more direct, and direct merchants will look to stores as a means of competing with larger rivals and growing their brands,” according to Neil O'Keefe, the DMA's vice president for the catalog and multichannel segment.
• Interactive Marketing: According to Alan Moss, Google’s director of online sales and operations, “the current state of the economy may accelerate movement down the path that direct marketing has already begun traveling over the past few years--the path towards increased measurability.”
• Media/publishing: In 2009, Mobile Marketer Editor Mickey Alam Khan expects “resources will be moved to the Internet and even mobile, although those two channels will not be able to pay the bills for most media companies, especially with the way they are set up today.”
(Report quotes courtesy Les Luchter, MediaPost’s Marketing Daily.)
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