Imagine my good luck at receiving a credit adjustment in the mail for $161.64.
Not knowing exactly what a credit adjustment is, I rip open the nondescript, official looking envelope to find that I have been included in a select group of individuals chosen for a special publisher’s offer on a three-year subscription to Motor Trend magazine — an offer not available to the general public.
The regular subscription price is $179.64, but with my special credit adjustment of $161.64, the price is only $6 per year. Wow.
Okay, I get that Google has changed the world and the way business is done, and their leading-edge apps are leveling the playing field for smaller companies; but, if they’re going to employ traditional media to market those apps, they might want to bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s an embarrassment, or it should be. Either they don’t realize this, or they’ve become too arrogant to care.
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.
