Dirct and e-Marketing - Essay Example

The threat for the future of direct marketing is data protections and privacy laws accepted in order to protect personal information from undesirable intrusion. Until the problems of protection of personal data have been solved, public acceptance of the Internet for widespread online purchasing of good and services will not really take off. It should be mentioned that personal data is: "Information that identifies a person e.g. address, e-mail address, name etc. and "includes any expression of opinion about the individual" which is, recorded and processed" (Data Protection, 1998).

The field of marketing communications has seen dramatic changes since the 1980s, not least the unprecedented advances in marketing technologies. The ubiquitous Internet, ingenious smart cards, sophisticated customer databases, easily accessible data warehouses, and cost-effective direct mail have all contributed to a quantum leap in the quantity and quality of information exchanged between companies and their customers. Through information and communications technology, the pace of exchange has reached lightning speed and the costs of information processing have plummeted.

The impact on the everyday lives of businesses and individuals has been profound (Chaffy, Mayer, Johnson, Ellis-Chadwick, 2000). Privacy concerns relate not only to interception and subsequent misuse of credit card or other personal data on the Internet but also extend to private use of information held on computers about individuals, such as health, tax and social security records, and to monitoring of what is downloaded from different sites and by whom. For instance, if someone goes into a e-shop the staff can record which items they are buying and their personal information such as e-mail, telephone, etc.

On the Internet, the computers holding the Web pages log all comings and goings. The organisation running the site - in the case of official information, has a complete record of everything they look at, their interests and concerns. " The factors that exacerbate concerns are unsolicited communications, particularly if they presume to extend a relationship beyond what the consumer recognises, and especially if the communication is from an unknown organisation, and even more so if personal data has been expropriated and exploited through such mechanisms as the exchange of mailing lists.

For some people at least, a further cause for concern is its wastefulness" (Clarke, 2005). Without the transparency afforded by building freedom of information and data protection principles into the systems which will deliver online services, it is hard to see why people should trust not to abuse the powers it will need to tie together the data from disparate sources. If the same 'smart' electronic card will in future be used for financial transactions, to hold medical records, criminal records, driving licence details and to authenticate my dealings with departments, how can a cost6omer be sure the firm will not abuse the technology to track my movements, lifestyle, reading matter and so on This gap in public trust is going to be one of the biggest problems facing the wiring up of public service delivery, and strong FOI and data protection laws are the absolute minimum requirements to bridge the divide.

On the one hand the right to be informed of the facts involved in any buyer-seller relationship is clearly a fundamental right. Some of