Personal Views

There are strong debates whether the design and implementation of Direct Marketing applications and practices are beneficial or not for the business purposes of customer-oriented firms. In my understanding, Direct Marketing practices can only be beneficial to both customer and organization, if they result as an outcome of an organized and systematic Relationship Marketing Service-Dominant process (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Most fundamentally, Direct Marketing can produce measurable -thus worthy- outcomes under the following conditions:

 A) Sequencial Selling to existing customer groups. In this case, Marketing Management has processed customers' data in CRM and Data Mining systems to conclude on segmentation criteria, thus targeting specific "product/service solutions" to satisfy specific, existing customer group needs (e.g customer retention tools).

B) Organized Relationship Management corporate approach to 1st year specific customer groups (e.g. customers with shared characteristics / needs). Such a Relationship Management approach involves three distinct stages:

1. The "First-Moment activities". Organization encourages the dynamic interaction between sales-reps and customers, investing into a long-term business-customer relationship (e.g. customer acquisition).
2. Development and application of sound Customer Segmentation Criteria. Marketing Management launches Welcome and Building Relationship cross-selling activities to enhance and maintain a holistic Relationship Management approach (e.g. Customer Activation).
3. Initiation of Direct Marketing campaigns. These campaings should involve sequential direct marketing activities and event management - preferably from the front-line employees, that have already been in contact with the customer / group.

Otherwise, ad-hoc, non systematic implementation of Direct Marketing practices would score low as a Marketing activity, creating customer's mistrust and lack of commitment.

Damian Giannakis, 2010