Journal of Interactive Marketing

A mail order firm wanted a strategy to increase response rates through catalog design. The strategy involved an indistinguishable experimental section within the main catalog to avoid prohibitive costs of putting together 16 totally unique catalogs and utilized Plackett–Burman screening designs, multivariate methods, and robust methods. The end result was an economically feasible new strategy that provided an increased profit-cost ratio, better catalog design, prediction of customer response data, important product perspectives, and marketing strategies for long-term impact.

This article reports results of a survey conducted to ascertain attitudes toward advertising and direct marketing on Internet. Results indicate that respondents react negatively to untargeted “cyber-junk” but are more favorable toward targeted marketing communication efforts. The Internet also allows marketers to target and communicate with highly involved and interested consumers, both domestic and global. The strengths and weaknesses of using Internet as a direct marketing medium are assessed.

Applying a neural network (NN) to the targeting and prediction problems in target marketing poses some unique problems and difficulties unparalleled in other business applications of neural computations. We discuss several of these issues in this article, as applied to solo mailings, offer remedies to some, and discuss possible solutions to others. A numerical example, using NN backpropagation models and involving realistic data, is used to exemplify some of the resulting issues.

The desire to maximize marketing effectiveness and reduce communication costs has increased direct marketers’ reliance on computerized databases, customized persuasion, and other consumer information intensive strategies and tactics (28,54). The belief that the success of marketing efforts is positively related to the amount and specificity of individual-level consumer information (7), however, has raised questions about how far companies should be allowed to go in learning about or attempting to persuade consumers (6,40). In the process, privacy has become widely evoked, but often elusive concept. This article develops a framework for addressing privacy concerns that arise when direct marketers utilize consumer information. It does so by identifying the underlying dimensions of the privacy construct and examining the relationships between those dimensions and direct marketers’ consumer information practices. This approach not only helps identify situations when privacy matters, but suggests productive strategies and tactics for alleviating consumer concerns related to the use of individual-level consumer information.

Space allocation is a major decision for the catalog business. It depends on the demand function and management constraints. Sales elasticities with respect to price and catalog space allocated to books sold by mail order are measured at different stages of the product's life cycle. Econometric analysis of a sample of more than 700 observations for books sold by a French catalog club confirms that price elasticity is higher for repeats than for new books. Surprisingly, space elasticity is stable for the two groups. The study also concludes that some results obtained in advertising research on the effect of so-called mechanical variables of catalog display (frame, left/right page, etc.) are also valid for catalogs.

This article presents the findings from a descriptive study that examined a variety of issues regarding the use of direct marketing by U.S. fundraisers. Issues covered regard the use and effectiveness of various direct marketing methods, donors targeted, direct marketing objectives, and other performance- and strategic-related issues. The findings from selected relational variables are also presented.