Marketing overseas--where less counts for more
Traveling in Ireland and Holland during the final weeks of the Persian Gulf War, I felt like the only American in Europe.
Most evenings in Amsterdam someone would ask politely if I came from the United States, then shake hands and wish me well, as if I personally represented the burdens of war. By admitting I was American, of course, I was wantonly disregarding the scare stories about wartime travel, which strongly counseled concealing one's nationality. ("Try not to wear a baseball cap, and leave your UCLA sweatshirt at home." Every kid in Paris wears a baseball cap and a UCLA sweatshirt, but c'est la vie.) You just don't feel comfortable saying you're a Martian, and direct marketing doesn't qualify as a nationality.
It sure is an "internationality," though. The direct marketing fiddles are tuning up all over the world, and the music gets sweeter all the time. I've spoken in more than a dozen countries this past year, and everywhere I go I meet smart people doing good stuff.
And everywhere people ask: "How far behind the United States are we?" The question popped up more than usual in February. It's as if our technological tour de force in the Gulf suggested a similar know-how in other fields, such as direct marketing. That's hardly the case. If we could target as well as the Air Force, we'd rule the marketing world, but we're not even close, despite all the promises and propaganda of database marketing.
There's no doubt that we have more than anyone else: more markets, more infrastructure, more technology, and much, much more direct mail. People overseas gasp when they hear about our 63.7 billion pieces per year. Well they should. The flow of direct mail has become torrential, and consumers are drowning. The quantity of direct mail has changed the nature of the direct mail experience and that's one of the big differences between the U.S. and other countries. American consumers are savvy to all our tricks, many of which are getting tired as a result.
American direct marketing is quantitatively far different from anywhere else. But I'm not sure there's a lot of qualitative difference, especially when you look at prosperous, technologically advanced countries such as Germany or Holland or Finland.
In fact, there's often a marked superiority overseas when it comes to the creative dimension, especially in direct mail. Production values are generally higher, and art direction is often much better. I think there are three reasons for this, two of them technical, one of them cultural:
1. Smaller quantities mean that production quality doesn't have to be sacrificed for economies of scale.
2. Fewer mailing lists and less developed databases make creative more of a leverage point.
3. Culturally, a lot of countries--particularly European countries--have, well, more culture than we do. Creative is more important because the aesthetic side of things is more important. Direct mail aesthetics in the U.S. is more often than not a contradiction in terms.
Curiously, television seems a bit different. Hypnotized by wartime Cable News Network, I had more than a full helping of European direct response commercials. They're pretty crass. The British executions in particular would give us a run for our money in the loudness department. Maybe video is so quintessentially American, the Americanisms inevitably permeate the medium, at least in direct response.
Creative awards, of course, are a fixture of direct marketing conferences. Some people consider them a necessary evil. I consider them an unnecessary evil, but maybe that's too harsh. (David Ogilvy, interestingly, hates advertising awards, and says in a Jan. 28, 1991, Adweek interview that Rosser Reeves and Bill Bernbach shared his antipathy.) I think fondly of the Midwestern agency that won a regional creative award a few years back for a direct marketing program that was never executed.
My favorite recent creative award programs were in Wiesbaden, Germany, at the German DMA Conference, and in Dublin, at the Irish DMA. In both cases the entire ceremony took just 20 minutes. Recipients marched quickly to the stage, were given plaques, shook hands, posed for photos, and then everyone returned to talking, eating and drinking (especially in Dublin).
Two hundred fifty people attended the Irish DMA. The proportional attendance in the U.S. would be about 21,000 people, nearly three times larger than the biggest DMA conference in history.
The Irish are a great bunch of laughers, which was terrific because (in my opinion) direct marketing is not only fascinating intellectually, it's often quite amusing executionally. But when the Irish weren't laughing, they were most articulate on their problems, opportunities and potential.
And what potential there is in Ireland! They're as undermailed as we're overmailed--the average Irish household receives about six pieces of addressed direct mail a year, compared with our average of 4.3 per day. The Irish consumer has to react much differently from the American consumer--on the downside, perhaps wondering with more than a little discomfiture about how their names were obtained; on the upside, perhaps reading every word of every package.
The Irish are even more excited than their neighbors about the European Community--it theoretically swells their "domestic" marketplace a hundredfold, from 3 million to more than 300 million, after all.
But the people at the conference related immediately to the idea of the quantity of direct mail changing the nature of the experience, and there was much speculation about having to use different approaches for the English, the French and the home market, all of whom receive significantly different amounts of direct mail. That, of course, blows away economies of scale, one of the basic reasons for having the EC in the first place. But the economic unification of Europe will be filled with surprises, some of them bound to be disappointing.
On the other hand, there's a big, brave new world out there. We're all living in the global village, connected by a living, pulsating, electronic infrastructure that seems more and more like a worldwide central nervous system, creating feedback loops and facilitating dialogues.
That's what direct marketing is all about--feedback and dialogue. It doesn't take a prophet to see that the future of direct marketing is also the future of marketing, both here and abroad.
James Rosenfield is chairman of Rosenfield & Associates, a direct marketing firm based in San Diego.
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