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"Advertising should be relevant, relevant, relevant. Otherwise it serves no purpose." So says Lester Wunderman, considered by many as the pre-eminent guru of Direct Marketing (DM). Wunderman spoke to BT Online's Kushan Mitra in Jaipur. A first time visitor to India, he has quite taken by the visual splendor and the breathtaking architecture of the Pink City. Q. Your book on DM features 19 rules that direct marketers should follow. Do you think that these rules can be that easily transposed from one country to another? After all, isn't India a unique market in itself? A. When I wrote the book, I had no idea how successful it would be. The book was essentially written for America, but its defining principles have worked across the world. I am sure that I could as easily come up with a set of new rules for India if I was given enough information on the Indian market. The people may be slightly different, but you'll be amazed at how similar they are. After all, DM is something that is targeting the middle classes, and aren't middle classes similar across the world? Don't they all aspire to reach higher... to want more? The answer lies in that. Q. DM is often confused with direct selling; how are the two different? A. I would put direct selling, the stuff that companies like Amway and Avon do, as the most intrusive form of DM. Ringing doorbells is interrupting lives. But even direct sellers should use advertising. After all, we would all be more liable to buy a certain product if we knew about it. DM is about knowing all about the consumer, finding out more about him - likes, dislikes, spending habits, things like that. Q. So won't this be classified as an invasion of privacy? A. I understand that there are issues about privacy, but honestly, these are all false issues. These issues about privacy are being raised by those people who are by nature antagonistic or ignorant about the principles of DM. DM is a tool for consumers to interact with companies. Q. Why do you say that? A. Look at it this way. Unlike general advertising, you can actually quantify results from direct advertising. Companies can actually see a Return On Investment (ROI). The data is there for you to analyse. You can find out what works and what does not work. You know fairly quickly when a product is not doing well and why it is not doing well. You cannot just quantify, you can always refine and learn. Direct marketing agencies are therefore like huge laboratories. Q. So are you suggesting that general advertising is dead? A. Not at all, general advertising and DM have two different purposes. General advertising changes the way people think, direct marketing changes the way people act. So, one is about changing attitudes, the other is about changing behaiviour. They are both unique and they both have a place.... good advertising, that is. Q. Why 'good'? A. Tell me honestly, aren't most advertisements that you watch totally useless? When you put on your TV, you, a young man, see ads about arthiritis medicine or baby food, which have no purpose for you. A good ad is a relevant ad, otherwise, you the viewer or the reader will be immune to it. Most of the newspaper, more than half of it, is totally irrelevant. Advertising is intrusive. It should intrude on your time and get you to watch something, or read something, or listen to something. But it has to relevant. Without relevance, it will never work. It will just be a waste of time, space and money. Q. But isn't that a flaw of 'mass media' per se? A. The age of 'mass' is over. This is the age of the individual. Mass production, mass distribution, mass advertising are relics of the industrial revolution. Marketers have to treat their consumers individually, customize their contents around what they want. Q. Sort of like Amazon.com? A. Amazon is a great example. The website logs you on and knows your buying habits. It knows what you have bought and suggests things that it believes you might be interested in. And if you don't want that, you do not have to have it, you can switch it off. Again, look at television, the age of the set-top box is allowing me to choose exactly what sort of program I want to watch, which game I want to see, and the television companies are also seeing trends immediately, they can alter their programming around that. I don't want to see semi-naked women on the cover of my newspaper. Why should I? The technology exists for a newspaper to be customized to my needs. This was all technologically unfeasible when I came into this world quite some time ago, but these things are possible today. Q. But do media companies really want to invest in such technologies? A. Companies are by nature resistant to change, unless they can see immediate competitive advantages accruing from that change. Otherwise, no matter how revolutionary we call ourselves, aren't we all resistant to change? Q. Direct marketing is good, but isn't tele-marketing (now banned in the US) and spam both forms of this? A. Tele-marketing interrupts your life, and I think that several tele-marketers went too far in offering several people products that they frankly did not want or were not interested in. And unlike bad television or print advertising, you cannot really ignore a phone ringing, can you? Spam on the other hand I think is much-maligned technology that is still in a nascent stage. It is maligned by people who do not understand the potential of using the internet to sell products. Q. Looking back, which would you rate your best DM campaigns? A. There are so many of them, but definitely my most memorable one was launching the American Express credit card. Before that, I had worked on Diners Club. In fact, anyone flooded by credit card applications today would not be my best friend, I guess.
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