Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: direct mail, marketing, new market order
The death of direct mail has been greatly exaggerated. It’s not dead, but like most every other marketing medium, it has been redefined in the digital world as a much smaller yet still integral part of our complex multi-channel 
delivery and communications infrastructure.
Currently, however, it is the delivery utility and not communications that is keeping the USPS alive (though just barely with a reported loss of $3.8 billion this year). Like most organizations the USPS will have to continue to downsize and further reduce its cost structure while redefining service levels in order to survive in the new market order. The core focus going forward will be parcels and packages, competing with Fed Ex — all that stuff sold at Amazon has to get shipped. That could be an opportunity for direct marketers to break through the mailbox clutter, when there isn’t as much clutter.
Filed under: Business Models | Tags: business, employees, organizational philosophy
One of the reasons marketers have lost standing in the C-suite is that too many CMOs and marketing managers lack a basic understanding of business finance and do not speak the language of business, but that of marketing, and too often they are not aligned.
So say the principles at the Business Literacy Institute (BLI), a California consulting firm founded in 1998 that specializes in employee training, workshops and speaking engagements — to help organizations better understand the financial side of business.
“Our philosophy,” says principal and co-founder Karen Berman, “is that everyone in a company does better when they understand how financial success is measured, and how they make an impact on the company’s financial performance.”
With advertising saturation levels at a tipping point in just about every medium, both offline and online, where do advertisers go from here? Well, there’s a new ad medium that promises to break through the clutter, getting to captive audiences in a highly intimate environment: the bathroom. So now your business can reach new prospective customers while they’re doing their business.
All we need to do is replace all our existing toilets with the WOW Toilet.
It’s a universal retrofitted transparent toilet tank engineered with a space in the front to insert an advertising image or poster that is clearly displayed to users who have nothing else to look at. With more than 1.2 billion toilets in the U.S., this represents a massive new opportunity just waiting to be exploited as every one of them can be transformed into a billboard, turning otherwise wasted space into ad revenue and offering advertisers millions of potential impressions… or is it exposures?
I’ve never really bought into the idea of being your own brand. If you happen to be a celebrity, it’s a logical business brand
. But for the rest of us it seems a little pretentious, like we’re packaging ourselves and creating a more marketable image and identity; for whom, our friends and coworkers at the office? I tend to think other folks don’t view us as brands, they view us as people.
The celebrity elite is another story, as personal branding is the key to success with those icons in sports and entertainment whose lives we follow on television, gossip magazines and Twitter. After all, inquiring minds want to know. Many are a flash in the pan and most are not able to sustain for any length of time. Personal brands are far more perishable than product or company brands, susceptible to the short attention span of a fickle consumer public, or to self-destruction. Even major brands like Martha Stewart can be taken down by a single incident or breach of trust. We’ll see how Tiger does now that his brand has strayed off the fairway.
And now, in the category of worst practices for online direct marketing, the winner is: the Survival Seed Bank.
This seems like something right out of the back of a catalog mail order advertisement for bomb shelters back in the 1950s. In this case it’s targeted at a growing population of survivalists who believe the end is near, and the first thing to go will be our food supply.
The worst part is it appears to be working, which validates the premise of marketing best practices — that emotion drives response more effectively than rational consideration, with the two most powerful emotions being fear and greed (both of which come into play in this campaign).
