Long live direct marketing!

The DMA held a storming debate yesterday on past, present and future trends in direct marketing. Held at Experian's conference theatre in Nottingham, the event attracted over 60 marketers from across a broad spectrum of sectors from banking to education, from b-to-b to consumer, agencies and clients.

Our chairman, Brian Child, gave the industry something of a kicking: direct marketing has had its day, he argued. The bad reputation of the industry combined with the failure of agencies to understand the power of branding has seen the emergence of our advertising cousins successfully position themselves as the experts in integrated marketing. The rise of digital was a golden opportunity for direct marketers to apply their skills to a different channel. Yet the low cost of online communications, which put the emphasis on volume rather than timeliness and relevance, has meant that it's usually not the DM agency the client turns to for digital solutions.

Yet it is our understanding of accountable marketing which is where our future lies. If we focus on return on investment, response rates, testing, and in developing creative that builds relationships with customers then we will thrive. Strategic thinking supported with powerful creative executions will always be in demand. Long live direct marketeers!

The notees from the guest speakers are available here

Taking time out

As part of a new campaign we've purchased several dozen remote control cars. Here we are 'testing' the vehicles around the office...

Agency wins Construction Skills account

We're delighted to have secured our place on the roster for Construction Skills - the sector skills agency for the construction industry. The activity involves direct mail, press advertising and digital marketing targetted at construction employers. The selection process for this tender has seen 60 agencies whittled down to a short list of 10 with 5 of us selected following a series of presentations last month. A big thanks for all the hard work, late nights and inspiration put in by the team, particularly Amanda, Nick and Pete.

Direct marketing is dead! Long live direct marketing!

Are the harbingers of doom right? Or does the electronic age bring more opportunity than ever? New communications channels - podcasting and vodcasting, online publishing, content aggregation, SMS and social networking - have all brought new opportunities for us as marketers to build relationships with customers and prospects.

Come and debate the future of our industry at a special event organised by the DMA North on Wednesday, 17 September in Nottingham. Further details can be found here

Getting lucky & the art of persuasion

Business management guru, Tom Peters talks about how to engineer luck in business. Here's our random top 11 from his list of 50:

1. At-bats. More times at the crease = more runs.


2. Try it. Cut the crap and get on with something


3. Just do it. Ready. Fire. Aim. (Instead of Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim.)


4. Hire odd people. Boring folks, boring ideas


5. Don’t back away from passion. “Dispassionate innovator” is an oxymoron


6. Pursue failure. Failure is success’s only launching pad


7. Constantly reorganise. Mix, match, try different combinations to shake things up.


8. Listen to everyone. Ideas come from anywhere


9. Nurture intuition. Trust your inner ear.


10. Open the books. Make everyone a “businessperson,” with access to all the financials


11. Spend 50 percent of your time with business partners & suppliers

Marketing success in a slowdown

I participated in an Experian webinar on marketing approaches to use during an economic slowdown. Presented by Marie Myles, it was a very insightful overview of sound marketing techniques. We all know that the current economic downturn is putting alot of pressure on marketing budgets. As marketers we're having to work harder than ever to justify expenditure and demonstrate how we'll generate a positive return on marketing investment. Key messages were the need to concentrate on maximising sales from existing customers: the importance of retention over acquisition. The importance of focusing on the core proposition of our products and services was highlighted and ensuring that customer service is second to none.

By focus on marketing that drives response, this allows us to segment and target our customers and that ultimately by being measurable ensures we can clearly demonstrate the return from our activity. Experian's booklet on the 12 steps for creating value from marketing is available here

Stafford to Barmouth on a bike

110 miles, twelve riders, three support vehicles and five support crew, our aim: to get to the finish and raise funds for MacMillan Cancer Support. The three big climbs once we got to Wales were challenging, but the downhills made up for it. They were fantastic with over 45mph descents. It rained once or twice and turned really cold when we got quite high up, but nothing dampened our mood.

Pete Brown

Best practice in community marketing

In the snappily-titled ‘Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-based Social Marketing’ the author Doug McKenzie-Mohr explores how to influence behaviour change in various communities. The book talks about the successes of using community-based social marketing to identify barriers to behaviour change and then devising strategies to counteract these barriers.

If, as the book suggests, this approach has been shown to have a much greater probability of promoting sustainable behaviour, we’re interested to explore how the same approach can also work in a brand context. McKenzie-Mohr observes that if people observe their peers demonstrating positive behaviour, they are more likely to adopt it than if they were to have this suggested to them in an advertising campaign. It’s not a huge leap therefore to imagine communities adopting new brands or products if their peers and influencers are seen to be doing so!

Watch this space for some updates on clients who are starting to use this new Yes Agency technique.

Amanda McDonald

Nudge Nudge...

I was interested to read on a blog by Mark Easton (the BBC’s Home Editor) about a new book called ‘Nudge’ which suggests a more subtle psychological approach to changing behaviour. The book is based on the premise that instead of radical new moves or hard-hitting communications, a simple ‘nudge’ here and there is more likely to do the trick. For example, if people are advised when their energy consumption goes above the average for their street, they are more likely to act out of a sense of community. This dovetails nicely into our findings from our recent community research – people are more conscious than ever of their peers, and are happier to norm to their behaviour than to be told what to do by the government or big corporates. A very interesting insight for the future of marketing...

Amanda McDonald

Using all the senses

At a recent DMA North seminar on a multi-sensory approach to direct marketing, Gráinne Newborough demonstrated the importance of engaging all the senses. Using touch, smell or taste helps to engage people in a much more emotional way than simply using copy and images. She peppered her presentation with examples from the likes of Daz who use door to door sampling complete with citrus smells, the Royal Mail who mailed agencies with a letter carved into a block of chocolate. The image above demonstrates that even with jumbled copy the mind works easily to interpret what is meant.

Fellowship Honour for David

David was recently delighted to be nominated by Simon Hall, Chairman of the IDM to become a Fellow of the Institute of Direct Marketing. The Society of Fellows is a group of senior marketing practitioners with more than 10 years industry experience, and David was honoured to be invited to join. The IDM is looking for ‘fresh minds and new enthusiasm’ – exactly why David was identified. As a member of the DMA Council, David is no stranger to acting as a spokesperson for our profession and is very much looking forward to the challenge of helping to keep the IDM at the forefront of our rapidly changing sector.

Amanda McDonald

Ushering in a new era for education and training

Our current campaign for a local FE College is designed to encourage employers to get on board with the new Diplomas. The Diplomas educate young people to develop their skills in a particular sector (not a specific job) and become work-ready rather than job-ready. Our work includes a Direct Mail pack for parents and influencers, posters and radio. The outcomes are to get students onto the courses by demonstrating that local employers are keen to employ Diploma graduates. We’re looking forward to being part of this new era for education and training.

Community marketing – the future for marketing agencies?

A recent report from Forrester paints an interesting picture of the future of communications agencies. The Connected Agency is emerging with the specific aim of getting under the skin of its audiences to the point of membership, and only when it has attained the trust of a community can it introduce brands to them. There's more on this on our recently launched website yescommmunitymarketing.co.uk

A short stint in rehab

David and I recently spent a short stint in rehab – at Willowdene Farm in Shropshire.

We spent a morning with six residents helping them with interview techniques and holding mock interviews. Willowdene is a fascinating place where former heroin users spend nine months gaining up to 20 qualifications as well as undergoing extensive therapy. Over 90% of them go on to full-time employment and a drug free life after their time in the centre. We learnt a lot about the barriers that substance users have to face before starting afresh and hopefully passed on a few tips whilst we were there!

Amanda

Featured: Amanda with Jeremy, qualified Agricultural Engineer

Having a Ball at the DMA GlitterBall

On Friday night, the team had a cracking time at the DMA North’s GlitterBall at the Hilton, Manchester Deansgate. As elected creative partner to DMA North, we produced the invitations, tickets, place settings, menus, programmes and powerpoint presentation for the evening, so we were keen to let our hair down and enjoy ourselves when the night came around. The venue was gorgeous, and despite not winning a thing in the prize draw, we had a great time. Too great for some in fact... it was almost impossible to get Kev to leave...

The JCB Dragster

While visiting clients at SED today we spotted this drag racing JCB which was creating quiet a stir. It's a drag racing backhoe fitted with a 1000hp engine capable of doing speeds in excess of 100 mph. Check this out...

Meeting Drayton Bird

I recently met marketing guru - Drayton Bird. He led a packed seminar at the recent International Direct Marketing Fair at Earls Court. His presentation took us back to the basics of commonsense direct marketing. Our role as marketers, he said, is simply to find, and then keep, a customer. It's all about finding ways of developing relationships with customers. Dell, he argued, is ruining their brand through their continual focus on discounting.

Digital marketers are failing to learn the fundamentals of direct marketing. He put this down to complacency created by the low cost of digital marketing channels. "Email is an incredibly cheap medium compares to direct mail. There is a tremendous cost advantage which means you don't have to try as hard. His two key rules are: one, test everything. Two, if in doubt refer to rule one. There are no certainties, no short-cuts, no set route map for success. Test and then test again.

Here's the transcript of his presentation...

Applying the art of persuasion to London voters

The agency was asked to develop a campaign for Boris. Here's one of the ideas submitted...

10 things to do when budgets are under pressure

1. Act differently! If you follow your competitors, you will fail. A smaller marketing budget will be better spent on insightful, relevant and different creative work to a select few, than generic communications to the masses.

2. Take the opportunity to refine your marketing strategy – re-focus on what’s important and plan for the future.

3. Be smarter in your targeting – is your product time specific or seasonal? If so, focus on the period that will generate the greatest yields. Refine your customer segmentation and focus on cross-selling and up-selling to higher value customers.

4. Cut out the wastage in your direct marketing – check your data against the mortuary file, make sure all your goneaways are stripped out, validate every record via tele-marketing to create more tightly targeted mailings

5. Collaborate with customers to find out how your product could be enhanced to help them through the recession – customers you have collaborated with are more likely to buy in to your products and this generates sales.

6. Use a smaller marketing budget to concentrate on core activity and make it work harder. Moving budgets from TV to online for example can save significantly on costs and still yield the same results. Equally, using word-of-mouth and customer advocacy can be a great way of reaching the right people at a fraction of the cost.

7. Reinvest acquisition budgets into research and development so that new products and services are ready for launch as your market begins to recover.

8. You won’t be alone in having your budgets cut – this will almost certainly be done to reflect a change in the market. Spend time learning about the smaller customers of your weakest competitors. Those with attractive growth prospects and strong balance sheets will yield future rewards.

9. Take stock of what’s been working and what hasn’t. You’ll have more time now to develop robust measurement devices and concentrate on what’s worked well in the past.

10. Challenge your bosses! Many cut budgets in times of recession, however, research shows that consumers don’t stop spending during a recession, plus the advertising environment will be less cluttered and subsequently less expensive. So really in times of recession, marketing budgets should be rising!

Amanda McDonald

Going Green for the Good of the Industry

The DMA’s Going Green in Manchester event last week posed a few interesting challenges for the attendees. Although as an industry we are only responsible for 2% of household waste, we are being placed under increasing scrutiny. As such, if we’re not whiter than white, we are exposing our trade and our colleagues to legislative pressure.

One thing we can all do to help our industry is to encourage recipients of our direct marketing print to recycle their unused mail, validate our data as much as possible and only mail those contacts that we are confident will yield the least wastage. So, not only can we do our bit to save the environment, we can also save some costs and save the future of our industry.

Amanda McDonald