The Marketing Book 5th Edition

568 The Marketing Book

Direct marketing is more than selling direct

All of the companies we have named use direct
marketing and not just when they are selling
through their mailings, catalogues and web-
sites. Direct marketing has come to mean more
than just selling direct.
Any company that uses direct response adver-
tising, on-line or off-line, and maintains a customer
database, is using direct marketing.
Tesco would remain a major direct mar-
keter if it scrapped its website tomorrow. Tesco
maintains a huge customer database (Clubcard)
and tailors offers to its customers, through
personalized direct mail, based on their past
purchasing behaviour (Table 22.2).
Magnetic-strip cards like Clubcard enable
retailers to link customer identities with

purchases and use the data to offer the cus-

tomer rewards, offers, events and service

which, to all intents and purposes, are tai-

lored to the customer’s needs and preferences.

Although more than 10 million people receive

quarterly Clubcard mailings, there are many

thousands of variations to these mailings,

reflecting customers’ different shopping

patterns.

Even though the vast majority of Club-

card members visit Tesco to do their shop-

ping, this is still termed direct marketing

because the programme is based on the col-

lection of shop visit and purchase data, and

careful analysis of individual customer prefer-

ences. The activity may also be termed rela-

tionship marketing or even loyalty marketing.

Of these terms, direct marketing is the most

meaningful, being capable of precise

definition.

Table 22.2 Tesco Clubcard

History, operation and scale

Tested October 1993, launched nationally February 1995.

Card applications in-store, communications in-store and direct mail.

Over 200 million product purchases a day by over 10 million customers.

Customer information and applications

Customer data:

Visit patterns Spend levels

Departmental usage Types of purchases

Coupon users/non-users Profile/geographic data

Broad customer typologies:

Loyalists Infrequent customers

Regulars New customers

Applications include:

Recruitment Lapsed and win back

Clubcard Plus (savings card) Helpline

Local marketing