Direct Marketing & its Challenges in the Information Technology Era

It is a well-known fact that now a days, marketers have become highly deliberative in media selection, as the availability of media has tremendously grown resulting from the phenomenal development in the field of Information and Communication Technology. The internet, mobile telecommunication, fax machine, e-mail and a number of on-line services have offered the marketers an additional media opportunity to be in direct touch with their existing customers for retaining them and also identify and interact with new prospects for selling products and services directly to them without any intermediary. According to the author this "Direct interaction between the marketer and his customers for different objectives through some advertising media can be said 'Direct Marketing'". The U.S. Direct Marketing Association is of the view that "Direct Marketing is an interactive marketing system that uses one or more advertising media to effect a measurable response and/or transaction at any location." Stan Rapp and Tom Collins in their book, The Great Marketing Turnaround (1990)' have suggested the term direct-order-marketing because, the emphasis in direct marketing is on customer order. They have further elaborated that direct interaction leads to direct relations between the marketer and his customers; therefore another subset of direct marketing is direct-relationship-marketing.