The benefit of direct marketing

Until last year, before the COVID pandemic, I traveled around the world and saw many people on business. Now, my life (work) style has changed significantly. I just go to work and straight back home. Although people around me would feel the same way, I’m fed up with seeing the same faces at work and home every day. This big change, however, has told me a lot: How much I like my past work style with many business trips, even though that was always a series of all-night trips; How much important changes and communication with people are. I may ask too much for life, but we social animals are not satisfied only with food and drink. Would you agree? If yes, direct marketing is highly recommended for you.

Marketing finely tuned for each customer

In my definition, the key point of direct marketing is two-way communication. I think the key point makes the marketing completely different from other frameworks. In most cases, sellers deliver advertising messages to an unspecified large number of public, while direct marketing carefully tunes messages according to customers. The famous example is the photo album of old mobile phones by Soft Bank (the third-biggest mobile carrier in Japan). They researched mobile phones a customer has used so far and collected the photos of those mobile phones in one album for each customer. Their advertising message almost made me cry: “Let’s add a new page to the album with us.”

Direct marketing is not efficient but humane

As you can see, the direct marketing is not good in efficiency and takes longer before bearing fruits, but it more than makes up for such disadvantages. We can communicate closely with customers. The COVID pandemic has been doing economic damage to all of us. Among our overseas partners, the Philippines dealer has suffered heaviest from an additional unfortunate accident. I just wanted to do something for them and sent direct messages via Facebook to a number of architects and interior designers in the Philippines. Totally different from the above example of Soft Bank, what I did was just a letter of appeal for help. Surprisingly enough, some of them sent back kind messages. I don’t think what I did produced huge results, but believe the kind replies would surely encourage the Philippines dealer. Through the experience, I come to think direct marketing is not a desk theory but the restoration of human communication.

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