Editor’s Corner
A GLOBAL MARKETING UPHEAVAL IS UNDERWAY

What happens when the cost of a phone call to Tokyo is no different or even less than a local call to your neighbor? When you do business with people by e-mail whom you never talk to? When every home has a universal mailbox and you can send faxes, e-mail or voice or video mail to consumers for a few pennies each?

Will we get less advertising in the mail? Will we get fewer telemarketing calls while we’re eating dinner?

I don’t think so. I think we’ll be bombarded on all fronts. As more companies embrace direct marketing or hone their current direct marketing skills to an exact science, all channels leading to consumers will become even more congested than they already are now. There’ll be so much noise out there, a simple approach won’t work anymore. It will take multi-pronged programs to engage the attention of a prospect.

I read recently of a device designed specifically for people who can’t say no on the phone. When a telemarketer calls, you press the button on the device and put down the phone. The device then tells the telemarketer that this number does not take phone solicitations, repeats the number and says a complaint would be filed if the telemarketer’s company calls again.

Or maybe we’ll follow in the footsteps of publishers who have dropped their midlist authors. Unable to manage so many types of marketing, companies will stop selling so many products, leaving us with fewer brands of soaps and sodas to choose from. Perhaps marketers will ask themselves if the results of dropping millions of pieces of mail a year are worth while and scale back their campaigns. But that would be risky. Fewer products, less shelf space in the supermarket. Less direct mail, less mindshare of your prospects and customers.

I think what will definitely blow me away is getting a telemarketing call from Australia, offering me a chance to buy a stuffed koala bear. Foreign calls would get my attention for a year or so, until the world just became too commonplace and I’d await the first marketing letter or call for a tour from outerspace including a room at the Hilton on the Moon. E-mail, the Internet, all of cyberspace would pale in comparison.