Advertisers frequently refine direct mail practices into targeted mailing, when mail is sent out following database analysis to choose recipients considered most likely to reply positively. For instance a person who has demonstrated an interest in golf may receive direct mail for golf connected products or sometimes for goods and services that are suitable for golfers. This use of database analysis is a type of database marketing. The United States Postal Service calls such aform of mail “advertising mail” ( or admail for short).
Couponing is traditionally used in print media to elicit a reaction from the reader. A typical example is a coupon that the reader cuts out and presents to a super-store check-out counter in order to avail of a discount. Coupons in newspapers as well as in magazines cannot be considered direct marketing, for the reason that the marketer incurs the cost of supporting a third-party medium (the newspaper or magazine); direct marketing intends to circumvent that balance, paring the costs down to exclusively delivering their unsolicited sales message to the client, without supporting the newspaper that the consumer looks for and welcomes.
For a lot of marketers, a comprehensive direct marketing campaign employs a combination of channels. It is not strange for a large campaign to combine direct mail, telemarketing, radio and broadcast TV, as well as online channels such as, for example, email, search marketing, social networking or video. In a report that was conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, it was established that 57% of the campaigns studied were employing incorporated strategies. Of those, almost half (47%) launched with a direct mail campaign, characteristically followed by e-mail and then telemarketing.
Pricing as the most efficient profit lever. Pricing can be come within reach of at three levels. The industry level, market level, and transaction level.
Pricing at the industry level normally focuses on the overall economics of the industry, counting supplier price changes and client demand changes.
Pricing at the market level bases on the competitive position of the price in comparison to the value degree of difference of the product to that of comparative competing goods.
Pricing at the transaction level bases on managing the implementation of discounts away from the reference.
Demand-based pricing is any kind of pricing technique that uses consumer demand – derived form perceived value - as the central element. Demand based pricing includes : price skimming, penetration pricing, bundle pricing, psychological pricing, geo and premium pricing, price discrimination , price lining, and premium pricing as well.
Among pricing factors are manufacturing cost, market position, competition, market conditions, and quality of products.
Unusual approaches are ‘contractual systems’, frequently led by a wholesale or retail co-operative, and `administered marketing systems’ where one (chief) member of the distribution chain uses its place to co-ordinate the other members’ activities. This has customarily been the form led by manufacturers.
The intention of vertical marketing is to give all those concerned (and mainly the supplier at one end, and the retailer at the other) ‘control’ of the distribution chain. This takes away one set of variables from the marketing equations.
It is complicated enough to motivate direct employees to provide the needed sales and service support. Motivating the owners and employees of the autonomous organizations in a distribution chain needs even greater effort. There are many devices for attaining such motivation. Perhaps the most traditional is `incentive’: the supplier offers a better margin, to excite the owners in the channel to push the product more willingly than its competitors; or a competition is offered to the distributors’ sales personnel, in order that they are tempted to push the product. At the other end of the spectrum is the more or less symbiotic relationship that the all too uncommon supplier in the computer field develops with its agents; where the agent’s staff, support as well as sales, are trained to almost the same way as the supplier’s own staff.
Intensive distribution is a kind of distribution when the majority of resellers stock the commodities (with convenience products, for instance, and particularly the brand leaders in consumer products markets) price competition may be obvious.
Selective distribution is the normal pattern (in both consumer and industrial markets) where ’suitable’ resellers stock the goods.
Exclusive distribution is a case when only specially selected resellers or authorized dealers (normally only one per geographical area) are permitted to sell the ‘product’. Frequently this form of distribution stipulates the contracted resellers are not able to offer competing products.
A lot of the theoretical arguments about channels consequently revolve around cost. In contrast, most of the practical decisions are concerned with management of the consumer. The small company has no option but to use intermediaries, often a number of layers of them, but large companies ‘do’ have the option.
On the other hand, many suppliers seem to suppose that once their product has been sold into the channel, into the beginning of the distribution chain, their job is done. Yet that distribution chain is simply assuming a part of the supplier’s responsibility; and, if he has any ambitions to be market-oriented, his job should really be extended to controlling, albeit very indirectly, all the processes elaborated in that chain, until the product or service gets to the end-user.
A lot of the marketing methods and techniques which are applied to the external consumers of an organization can be just as successfully applied to each subsidiary’s, or each department’s, ‘internal’ consumers.
In some parts of definite organizations this may in fact be formalized, as products are transferred between separate parts of the company at a `transfer price’. To all intents and reasons, with the possible exception of the pricing mechanism itself, this process can and should be considered as a standard buyer-seller relationship. The fact that this is a captive market, resulting in a `monopoly price’, should not dampen the participants from employing marketing methods.