Direct Marketing, Telemarketing - Essay Example

Through the store image, retailers can force customers to buy their products. Store image is necessary to persuade and create a special image in the consumers' minds.
Store image helps the retailer to differentiate itself from competitors. Customers integrate all their experiences of observing, using, or consum¬ing a product with everything they hear and read about it. Information about stores comes from a variety of sources, including advertising, publicity, sales personnel, and packaging. Perceptions of service after the sale, price, and distribution are also taken into account. The sum of impressions is a store image, a unified image of both the products and the store that markets them. Store image attracts customers to both the store and the branded merchandise (McDonald, Christopher 2003).

Merchandise assortment helps to attract a wider target audience of potential consumers. The buyer orientation includes such categories as a convenience, preference, shopping, and specialty goods. However, different assortments and quantities of products may be desired and purchased in various countries. Merchandise assortment makes selling more rewarding. It makes it easier for the customer to select a product they need and reduces the time required for everyday purchases. The conceptual foundation of merchandise assortment is that a set of products can be viewed as different collections of attributes providing benefits to the buyer (Merchandise For Profit, 2005).

2. Direct marketing involves an exchange with individuals whose names and addresses are known to the company. Companies use direct mail, telemarketing, television, print, and other media to generate responses and build databases filled with purchase histories and other information about customers. Direct mail uses the postal service as a vehicle for delivering an offer to prospects tar¬geted by the marketer. Direct mail is the primary marketing tool for retailers; it is also popular with banks, insurance companies, and other financial services providers. Direct marketing is now often referred to as customer relationship marketing because each response allows the company to add information to its database. That information, in turn, allows marketers to refine the offer and generate more precisely targeted lists.

A retailer can rent a mailing list to target virtually any type of buyer; naturally, the more selective and specialized the list, the more expensive it is. It helps can reach a widely dispersed target market, and present a message in a very personalized way, it offers the opportunity of informing consumers in detail about the complete range offered. The disadvantages are: too much direct mail is currently used, so the level of response will be low. Also, direct mail is very cost consuming and a company should spend a lot of additional funds to use this marketing tool.

Telemarketing is currently the leading direct marketing medium by spend. Spending on direct mail continues to increase, despite the advent of new media and the use of TV as a direct-response medium. The database takes a pivotal role in communications and it is an important budgetary consideration. Advertisements placed on TV encourage consumers to order directly by telephone. The use of demographic descriptors helps identify commonalities. For consumer markets, these include age, sex, education, stage in the family, life cycle, and socio-economic group. The main disadvantage is that it reaches a narrow target audience in contrast with the other marketing tools. Also, the cost of producing a single TV advertisement is about $2-3 million; in addition, a company has to pay for time slots on cable and satellite systems and local TV channels (Stone, Jacobs, 2001). Read More