Journal of Interactive Marketing

The research investigates the relationship between frequency of purchase through direct mail and the purchase of products offered by mail. Although this relationship proved generally positive, in some instances a negative relationship was found. Two variables are proposed to explain these conflicting results: direct mail preference—the preference of consumers towards buying by mail—and income, which serves as a proxy for the preference of consumers to the particular product. Subsequently, the practice of target selection in the direct mail industry is examined vis-a-vis these two variables.

In a recent article in the Journal of Direct Marketing, R. Thrasher gave an introduction to the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) methodology from the point of view of direct marketing. Following up on this work, with the help of a case study, this article investigates further technical aspects of response modeling with CART and Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) of practical relevance to direct marketing professionals and researchers and compares the performance of CART and CHAID models built on the same analysis file, finding that the response lifts are very close for both types of models.

During the past century, database marketing techniques have become increasingly important in allowing companies to reach and communicate with customers. An examination of the history of the field suggests that many of the core concepts associated with database marketing date back several decades, but the dissemination of these concepts into different industries and their integration with one another has proceeded slowly. This article presents an overview of how the field of database marketing has developed, with the hope that knowledge of what has happened in the past will enable marketers to find better ways to create relationships with their customers in the future.

This article considers the use of an experimental design for studying the impact of various factors on response rate in a direct mail application. First we show why factorial designs are superior to “traditional” experimentation in which factors are studied “one-at-a-time.” We then describe 2-level fractional factorial designs. We next introduce Taguchi methods for designing fractional factorial experiments. These methods have been applied primarily in the operations and design engineering areas, but hold great promise for many other settings, including the direct marketing arena. The methods are easy to use and do not require the user to have extensive statistical training.

This article examines the power of demographics, purchase histories, and consumer decision-making styles to predict catalog loyalty behavior. Based on data from two surveys of women's apparel catalog item buyers, the study finds that repeat-prone customers are distinguishable from switchers on several measures. Decision-making style segments exist among regular apparel catalog shoppers that work in combination with demographics and purchase frequencies to predict the probability of loyalty behavior, providing the basis for positioning strategies that appeal to repeat-prone market segments.

This study investigated both personal characteristics and attitudes toward properties of a videotex shopping system for use as predictors of its adoption among catalog shoppers. The hypotheses tested were developed from diffusion of innovations theory and previous research on adoption of videotex. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire from approximately 600 catalog shoppers who resided in cities in which a videotex shopping system had been recently introduced. Results indicated that attitudes toward the characteristics of videotex, particularly its relative advantage and compatibility with needs and experiences, were better predictors of intent to adopt than were the personal characteristics of consumers.