STREETS AHEAD

A north London newspaper recently ran a story – headlined “Horrified mother’s cutting comment” – in which an angry local mother whose child used a pair of scissors distributed as part of an unsolicited mailshot to give himself a haircut.

The scissors were sent out to underline a cable TV company’s advertising, based on the idea that it could cut telephone costs. The company pointed out that they were toy scissors and conformed to European standards on toy safety, but has now stopped the campaign.

Fortunately, such potentially nasty stories are rare in the door-to-door distribution industry. In fact, recent research conducted by the Association of Household Distributors suggests that 29 per cent of the public find items distributed door-to-door (including free newspapers, leaflets and samples) “useful”, which compares well with the percentage of the population that like posters, newspaper and radio advertising (32 per cent, 29 per cent and 20 per cent respectively). TV ads are liked by 53 per cent – but, as the door-to-door distributors point out, TV advertising is extremely expensive.

Some marketers may justifiably question why an item such as a pair of scissors was even considered for a mass distribution campaign. Could its delivery not have been restricted to households without children?

Unfortunately, sampling can seldom be so well targeted: the only way for a distribution company to ensure the scissors ended up in the hands of an adult would have been to deliver the mailer in person to individual householders. That option is expensive, although it has been used in the past and can be effective.

Circular Distributors did exactly that for a major petfood company a few years ago, in a campaign that combined the delivery of relevant samples of either dog or cat food with the collection of information about which households had pets and what they were.

However, such an approach is extremely expensive, and door-to-door delivery has traditionally marketed itself on its impact as a mass medium and its relative cheapness. Indeed, a number of campaigns have seen the same mailer delivered to every UK household – all 22 million or so. Camelot used door-drop leaflets to promote the launch of the National Lottery, while the Government has used the medium to distribute mailings about its education policy.

Marketers, though, are beginning to wake up to the power of micro-marketing – the segmentation of the consumer population into ever smaller groups, according to various geodemographic or social criteria.

As a result, door-to-door deliverers are having to adapt and re fine the services they offer, trying to find ways to reduce the minimum number of households reached in one door-drop.

Assuming they do not opt for the personal delivery route, marketers could refine their door-drops to target delivery points, using the Post Office’s new extended postcode.

A year ago, the Post Office introduced new scanning and sorting machines capable of reading computer barcodes. In tandem with the development, it introduced the Delivery Point Suffix, two extra characters added to the end of the postcode which identify every single delivery point, or letterbox in the UK. Each letterbox may serve more than one household: but the DPS still offers direct marketers the chance to target even more specifically than the average 17 households served by the same postcode.

In practice, however, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to be using the DPS-enhanced postcode for door-to-door delivery: it would be unusual for them even to use the postcode. While offering better targeting, postcode selection for door-to-door would make the process prohibitively expensive.

Traditionally, the door-to-door industry has used postcode sector targeting (the first four identifiers of the traditional six-figure postcode) to divide the country into blocks of about 2,500 households (there are a total of 8,900 postcode sectors in the UK). Recently, however, it has begun to look at ways to target more specifically. The country’s biggest distribution company, Circular Distributors (CD), has developed its own system to further segment the postcode sector groupings.

Nick Wells, managing director of CD, says: “The door-to-door industry has always been wed to postcode sectors. That’s the way it’s worked since the mid-Eighties. We’ve gone to subsector targeting, of about 700 households, grouping similar household types together on the basis of similar housing types.”

The proprietary system – called Microtargeting – has cost CD 500,000 and has taken 18 months to develop. It combines information from the new computerised versions of the Ordnance Survey’s standard 1:50,000 maps with a Post Office-approved map of postcode boundaries and another map showing the boundaries of the Enumeration Districts used in the last Census (each ED covers an average of 150 households). The Mosaic classification for each ED has then been added with EDs of similar types grouped together to create microsectors.

New maps were then printed out and sent to CD’s distribution teams for transferring onto local street maps, so the new microsectors could be verified by people who knew the areas.

Wells says Microtargeting grew out of demands from CD’s customers for better control over distribution and targeting. He says: “We had to come up with something that was manageable at ground level. Using a single postcode would not be practical because of the expense.”

While CD is using Microtargeting as a major marketing tool for its own services, it is not the first time geodemographic information has been used to refine door-to-door distribution. Shelly Radice, executive director of the industry body, the Association of Household Distributors, says: “All geodemographic systems are amenable to use for sampling. Mosaic is the industry standard, with Acorn not far behind.”

A number of fmcg companies are using lifestyle systems to analyse their existing customer databases. Sean Cooper, project manager at lifestyle database company NDL International, says: “We had 20 or 30 clients doing so this year. They may have already established a customer profile with us, or it may be their first time. Either way, they have been overlaying our data onto their distribution database.”

David Sneesby, group marketing director for the marketing services division of Taylor Nelson AGB, which includes MRM Distribution, says his company can offer considerable targeting opportunities in conjunction with the group’s research facilities.

“We can offer SuperTargeting, which runs off the back of the AGB Superpanel consumer research programme,” he explains. “We can match the information collected from the Superpanel against the customer’s distribution database and find out how they fit. What’s more, we can also use the Superpanel to collect information about the effect of a distribution – we can look at consumers’ use of products before and after a distribution.”

He adds: “We’re continually looking at adding value to the customer’s campaign. The success of door-to-door really depends on targeting. There’s no better way to encourage consumers to test products than to use sampling to put it in their hands. Door-to-door is the most cost-effective means.”

While CD is trumpeting the development of Microtargeting, other companies offer different ways to segment the country. The Leaflet Company, for example, has divided postcode sectors into rounds: its distributors – who deliver free newspapers around the country – cover the same streets, containing on average 250 households, every week. Most free newspaper companies have spent considerable time analysing the geodemographics of these rounds, The Leaflet Company says, so marketers can pick and choose to better target their customers.

Mark Young, managing director of The Leaflet Company, says: “Targeting and distribution are the two key factors which together make the difference between a successful or unsuccessful door-drop. Distributing a leaflet through free newspapers enables clients to target down to round level so distributing to units of 250 households. Evidence from our clients suggests free newspapers achieve about 15 per cent greater efficiency than solus or shareplan.”

However, while the rival door-to-door distribution companies may squabble over whether their respective methods offer better results, they appear to be united in their belief that they have to give marketers more effective targeting. As a result, over the next year or so should see further refinements being made by the door-to-door distribution industry.marketers more effective targetting. As a result, over the next year or so marketers should see further refinements being made by the door to door distribution industry.