Consumers’ perceptions of direct marketing techniques

Abstract

Direct marketing has become a highly popular and successful component of marketing. Today direct marketing-originated sales are growing at more than twice the rate of all general merchandise sales. This growth signifies an important shift in the marketing efforts of many companies to more selectively and directly target their customers with less waste and more timely response.

Despite this growth, the research literature on direct marketing is lacking in both its breadth of coverage across the various techniques available and in its depth of investigation in any one area. For instance, most studies have narrowly focused on through-the-mail techniques such as direct mail or catalog shopping. One obvious reason for this emphasis is the ability on the part of the researcher to control for message exposure and contain research costs. Direct marketing generally encompasses much more, however, such as direct response advertising scheduled in the customary mass media channels — radio, television, newspaper, and magazine — as well as telemarketing and door-to-door selling. The available research has also been developed primarily to define the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the direct marketing consumer, or to quantify the sales/inquiry response of alternative executions controlled experimentally in the field. Virtually no published research has addressed how the consumer, rather than the researcher or practitioner, perceives direct marketing; yet, insight into the way the consumer views direct marketing in its various forms, and how the consumer sees him/herself in relation to these techniques, is vitally important to the direct marketer.