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NEWSLETTER
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Volume 18, May 22, 2001
"BACK TO THE FUTURE" WITH DRTV! 10 advantages of the one on one connection
By Edward Easton
Before television, before radio even, there was direct marketing. It was a simple formula repeated over millennia. A pedlar would load up his mules, yaks, camels, or wagon with manufactured goods and head out of an urban center to open up a new marketing frontier in isolated settlements. He brought badly needed products, old and new, to sparsely populated areas whose marketing needs were ill-served by any other means. He faced almost no competition, dealt one on one with his customers and found a ready market for anything he had to sell. On the American frontier he was a one man rolling general store at a time when his closest brick and mortar competition was often a hundred or more miles away. And he made a fortune. His only risks were bandits and Indian raiding parties, who might not take only his money, but his life. Still he ventured forth, year after year, enduring not only the known risks, but the loneliness of the trail - why? Because he made a lot of money!
Time has improved upon that formula, keeping all the benefits and eliminating nearly all the risk. It's called Direct Response television, or DRTV. It's a marketing method that has gathered an enormous amount of steam over the past decade because it accomplishes for the modern era what worked for the pedlar and his wagon.
Advantage one: Lower capital investment and financial risk. Firstly, there is no plant or "brick and mortar" store to build.
Facilities of that sort needed for product development can be rented at a fraction of the cost of actually owning them. And quite often start-up funding can be acquired from the same source with no cost at all in exchange for a small profit participation.
Advantage two: DRTV facilitates the test marketing of creative content, price points, and media buying before a major national commitment is made.
Advantage three: Tracking-you can know literally day-to-day how your campaign and sales are going.
Advantage four: Your sales pitch, like the pedlar's, is one on one, harnessing the immense power and reach of television to deliver millions of individual customers to your call center. There are no middlemen or bored counter clerks to dilute your message.
Advantage five: Immediate cash. Credit cards are wonderful things, fostering the impulse buy, and nearly everyone has one - (even people who shouldn't for that very reason.) But the money is in your account immediately, ready to finance more media buys, or another campaign.
Advantage six: Celebrity association - the pedlar has turned into a television or movie star! With your sales pitch in his mouth! No necessity to build brand awareness - you have it already!
Advantage seven: Moving images and sound, with appropriate close-ups can demonstrate your product or service to its fullest degree - an inherent property of television.
Advantage eight: Without middlemen or retailing mark-ups, you collect the full price of your product.
Advantage nine: Speed. No other marketing method allows you to update your message so quickly, in many cases almost overnight! Add an up-sell addendum or extensions to your initial offer to fine-tune it.
Advantage ten: Want to break into retail? What "brick and mortar" storeowner won't stock an item customers ask for because they've seen it on television? You sell it on TV; the store owner sells it in his store! You both increase your sales and make even more money!
DRTV marketing weds past and future to orbit sales into outer space, and beyond in the coming millennia.
Ever since the first man picked up a brightly colored sea shell and turned it into wampum in the new world, or dug up the first piece of immutable, untarnishable gold in the old, economic activity has driven the world. The buying and selling of goods and services is the literal root of all civilizations, from high to low. This process has intensified over the millennia, and will continue just like the expansion of the universe itself.
One day in the distant future, when the first colonists from earth will plant themselves on a distant planet, they will look up into the blackness of space and see a new constellation. They would do well to call it "The Pedlar".
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