Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay - Hardcover

Wunderman, Lester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394540638 ISBN 13: 9780394540634

Publisher: Random House, 1996

Synopsis

Lester Wunderman created the business known as direct marketing. He conceived and refined its basic strategies, and he gave it a name. Today, he is Chairman of Wunderman, Cato, Johnson, the largest direct marketing organization in the world, with billings in excess of $1.5 billion and 65 offices in 36 countries. This is his own story, in his own words, of how he did it -- how he sold everything from roses to Ford cars, from credit cards to coffee, using the direct marketing techniques he and his agency created; how he showed Time, Inc., how to market its magazines and Columbia Records how to become one of the largest and most sophisticated direct marketers in the world.

25 years before the Internet was conceived, in a now-famous speech delivered at MIT, Wunderman described the sales relationship of the future as "interactive." In tomorrow's electronic marketplace, the "interactive" techniques that Wunderman developed will account for the great majority of sales worldwide. Wunderman's intimate first-person account provides a business road map to the future.

About this title

About the Author

Lester Wunderman is Chairman of Wunderman, Cato, Johnson and Senior Adviser to the Board of Directors of Young and Rubicam, with which it merged in 1973. He has received countless awards for his contributions to the field of direct marketing and has been named to the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. He has served as Director and Secretary Treasurer of the American Association of Advertising and was Director of the Advertising Council. This is his first book. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sue Cott.

Reviews

Born in a Bronx tenement, Wunderman started his own advertising agency with his older brother in 1939, at the age of 19. It went under two years later. With a never-say-die attitude, he learned the ropes, and by 1959, Wunderman, Ricotta & Kline (WRK), which he had founded a year earlier, was the world's largest agency specializing in mail-order advertising. A collector of African art, conversant with Spinoza and Marshall McLuhan, Wunderman credits his 1972 meeting with the chief of Mali's Dogon tribe as the key to his understanding of kinship and power-sharing-insights that led him to merge WRK (now Wunderman Cato Johnson, which he chairs) with a larger general agency, Young & Rubicam. Highly skimpy on personal detail, this career-oriented autobiography is a seasoned pro's detailed casebook of direct-marketing hits and misses. Wunderman's campaigns helped launch the American Express card, boosted Time Inc.'s magazine division circulation, devised interactive media to sell Lincoln Continentals and made the zip code an accepted part of the postal system. His account of these and other legendary feats is high-energy. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A thoroughly engaging and informative memoir from the man who did the most to create direct marketing, an ad-industry arm that now generates annual volume exceeding $1 trillion in the US alone. Looking back on his long, eventful, and productive life, the Bronx-born Wunderman (who turned 76 this year) ruefully notes he did not get off to a particularly promising start. Indeed, the ad agency the would-be wunderkind (whose precarious finances had obliged him to quit college) and his brother launched toward the end of the Depression quickly failed. Learning from his mistakes, he quickly apprenticed himself to some of the savviest practitioners in the direct-mail field; with nary a mention of the J (for ``junk'') word, the author recalls successfully promoting such varied goods and services as the Acousticon hearing aid, Jackson & Perkins flora (notably roses), Columbia's LP Record Club, and a decidedly dubious book entitled I Was Hitler's Doctor. Setting up shop with two partners in 1958, Wunderman kept most of his old clients and attracted a host of new ones (Time-Life Books, Ford, American Express, et al.). With the help of computer technology, he continued to refine direct-marketing doctrine, thereby taking the catalog/mail-order business to the next level. His prospering Manhattan firm joined forces with Young & Rubicam during the early 1970s, affording the author access to the resources needed to test innovative advertising campaigns on a global basis, most recently in cyberspace via the Internet. Never a slave to work, Wunderman has always made time for cultural interests, including a world-class collection of primitive art, primarily from the Dogon, a tribe in Mali with whom he sojourned on several occasions. A consummate pitchman's commercial manifesto, complete with an ingratiating rags-to-riches narrative and a host of case studies illuminating the tricks of his catalytic trade. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

At one time, direct marketing meant door-to-door selling. Over time, it evolved to include party-plan selling and mail order. Now with interactive at-home shopping via cable television and the Internet, direct marketing has new, unlimited potential. Wunderman has been called the grandfather of direct marketing. His firm is the largest direct-marketing organization in the world, with offices in 36 countries, and Wunderman has worked with such clients as Time and Columbia Records. With an advertiser's braggadocio, he takes credit for the success of the American Express card and the zip code and for the invention of the magazine insert and even the term direct marketing. Filled with tips throughout, Wunderman's book tells how he did it all. Even at age 76, he has his eye to the future as he touts the "brand experience" and "contact strategies" that will allow him to take advantage of the electronic marketplace. Given the popularity of similar material, public libraries should consider multiple copies. David Rouse

Wunderman has been working in advertising since World War II and is currently the chair of his own direct-marketing firm. In this memoir, he describes his career and how he created the concept of direct marketing. He began by doing mail orders in newspapers and magazines in a small firm before moving on to create direct-marketing campaigns. Wunderman helped develop both the Columbia Record Club and the Book of the Month Club. He examines how his campaigns for American Express, Ford, and Time magazine, for example, were initiated and how successful they were. He offers a well-written look into the field of advertising and direct marketing that would be a welcome addition to any business collection.?Joel Jones, Kansas City P.L., Mo.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

NINETEEN THINGS ALL SUCCESSFUL DIRECT MARKETING COMPANIES SHOULD KNOW

1. Direct Marketing Is a Strategy, Not a Tactic
It's not an ad with a coupon, it's not a commercial with a toll-free number, it's not a mailing, a phone call, a promotion, a database, or a Web site; It's a commitment to getting and keeping valuable customers.

2. The Consumer, Not the Product, Must Be the Hero
The product must create value for each of its consumers. It must satisfy consumers' unique differences, not their commonalities. The call of the Industrial Revolution was manufacturers saying, "This is what I make, don't you want it?" The call of the Information Age is consumers asking, "This is what I need, won't you make it?"

3. Communicate with Each Customer or Prospect as an Audience of One
Advertising must be as relevant to each consumer as the product or service is. General advertising and more targeted direct marketing must both be part of a holistic communication strategy.

4. Answer the Question "Why Should I?"
The most dangerous question a prospect or customer asks is "Why should I?" And he may ask it more than once -- but never of you. The product and its communication stream must continue to provide him with both rational and emotional answers.

5. Advertising Must Change Behavior, Not Just Attitudes
Favorable consumer attitudes go only part of the way to creating sales. It's also the consumer's accountable actions such as inquiries, product trials, purchases, and repurchases that create profits.

6. The Next Step: Profitable Advertising
The results of advertising are increasingly measurable; they must now become accountable. Advertising can't be just a contribution to goodwill -- it must become an investment in profits.

7. Build the "Brand Experience"
Customers have to know and feel the brand as an experience that serves their individual needs. It has to be a total and ongoing immersion in satisfaction that includes everything from packaging to point of purchase, repurchase, and after-sale service and communications.

8. Create Relationships
Relationships continue to grow -- encounters do not. The better the buyer-seller relationship, the greater the profit.

9. Know and Invest in Each Customer's Lifetime Value
One automobile dealer calculated that a lifetime of cars sold to one customer would be worth $332,000. How much should a marketer spend to create such a loyal lifetime customer for a given product or service?

10. "Suspects" Are Not "Prospects"
"Prospects" are consumers who are able, ready, and willing to buy, "suspects" are merely eligible to do so. Communicating with prospects reduces the cost of sales; communicating with suspects raises the cost of advertising.

11. Media is Contact Strategy
Measurable results from media, not the number of exposures, are what counts. Measurements such as "reach" and "frequency" are out of date. Only "Contacts" can begin relationships.

12. Be Accessible to Your Customers
Be there for your customers--be their database and source of information and service through as many channels of communication as possible. They can't tell you what they need unless they can reach you.

13. Encourage Interactive Dialogues
Listen to consumers rather than talk at them. Let them "advertise" their individual needs. They'll be grateful for your responsiveness. Convert one-way advertising to two-way information sharing.

14. Learn the Missing "When?"
The answer "Not now" is as dangerous to advertising as "Not this." Only consumers know when they are ready to buy, and they will tell you if you ask them in the right way.

15. Create an Advertising Curriculum That Teaches as It Sells
A "curriculum" is a learning system that teaches one "bit" of information at a time. Each advertising message (bit) can build on the learning of the previous one. It can teach consumers why your product is superior and why they should buy it.

16. Acquire Customers with the Intention to Loyalize Them
Promotions sell product trials -- but not ongoing brand loyalty. They may also attract the wrong customers, who may never become loyal. The right customers must be acquired and persuaded to want what the product does and not what the promotion offers. The right customers may in fact be your competitor's best customers.

17. Loyalty Is a Continuity Program
"Totally satisfied" customers are least likely to fall away. Those who are merely "satisfied" may fall away without warning. To build ongoing relationships, rewards for good customers should be tenure-based (on previous purchases, usage behavior, and length of relationship). Rewarding "tenure" can prevent competitors from "conquesting" your best customers.

18. Your Share of Loyal Customers, Not Your Share of Market, Creates Profits
Spend more on the good customers you have. Ninety percent of most companies' profits come from repeat customers. It costs six to ten times as much to get a new customer as to keep an old one.

19. You Are What You Know
Data is an expense -- knowledge is a bargain. Collect only data that can become information, which, in turn, can become knowledge. Only knowledge can build on success and minimize failure. A company is no better than what it knows.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394540638
• ISBN 13: 9780394540634
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336