Marketing is all about understanding the customer and using everything you know to offer a better experience of your brand. Direct marketing adds another tier of information and personalisation to the communication. This wasn't complex 20 years ago when applied to the world of mail order. That was when hardware was expensive, software limited and the only direct channel involved the postman. We now live in a world where technology has given us the capacity to understand every nuance of behaviour in a way that was only dreamed of not so long ago.
The challenge is to understand what the elements of behaviour mean, and to create customer-focused activities accordingly. This means the direct marketing skills of creativity, data management, analysis, segmentation and measurement are the points of difference. Some of these, measurement, for example, have been in the digital media armoury for some time. Others, such as segmentation, are relative latecomers to the digital media mix.
If the future of digital profitability is about improving the performance of that 'long tail', then the techniques of direct marketers are inseparable from those needed in digital channels. Perhaps this column should be reinvented (Ed: We plan to). And before anyone suggests the title 'Integration', beware. That's another descriptor that gets my back up.
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