Applying science

Direct marketing (DM) is not short on theory. From academics to practitioners, the data-centred nature of the discipline tempts authors to produce new volumes. A quick search on Amazon yields 441 books on the subject, from classics by Graeme McCorkell and Drayton Bird to the latest works covering digital and internet marketing.

But what do all of the models and concepts outlined in these works really have to offer? Can you really do DM by the book? Or is the reality more prosaic, with clients and agencies alike making it up as they go along? After all, as one observer puts it, “Drayton Bird is on every client’s shelf – whether they have read them is another question.”

The central idea of DM – and the reason for its continued growth – is that its effects and results are predictable. At a time when clients are anxious to achieve the greatest possible return from their marketing budgets, this has huge appeal. And most DM practitioners start from the belief that what they do can be modelled.

“The beauty of DM is that, when you plan your communication strategy, you are building on knowledge and facts from the last time. This is fed back into the planning cycle after each and every campaign,” says Alan Timothy, chief executive of data consultancy Rocket Science. “If something happens, we know why. We can use this understanding to make sure it does or doesn’t happen again.”

This view is echoed on the agency side by Omaid Hiwaizi, a partner at HHM: “To play jazz, you need to understand scales. Only when you have learned them can you improvise. A prerequisite of any successful DM campaign is an understanding of the dynamics that affect response. Only then can we explore new mechanics, propositions and objectives.”

Doing it by the book

To the broader marketing world, DM practitioners present a consistent front: learned, responsible and accountable. They can point to a large body of evidence that suggests their decisions are rational, rather than just hunches. As WWAV Rapp Collins Zalpha strategy partner John Frood puts it: “DM is highly theoretical, but theory is perhaps not the right word – it is more scientific.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the central principle of DM – test, test and test again. Clients such as Reader’s Digest, Consumers Association and Time-Life set the standard by testing every square inch of their mail packs. Changes are not made to a successful mailing until it has been proven that they will create a better response.

Institute of Direct Marketing managing director Derek Holder says: “DM is a constant learning process – the principle is test and learn. Otherwise, how are marketers to know that what they have done is the best they can do? Unless you challenge your control all the time, you don’t know if you have the optimum combination of channels, offers, copy. You optimise through testing.”

This provides an approach that is highly reassuring to clients. Having established one successful execution – the control – alternative versions can be tested on small segments of the target market while the main body receive something that is known to work. If the alternative provides a better response, it becomes the control.

Yet Holder believes most direct marketers do not follow the process they claim to believe in. “The culture of testing has been forgotten. How many people still put together test matrices, confidence intervals and the like? When people do test, their findings are flawed because they change more than one factor at a time.”

On a tight rein

The reason for this dilution in rigour is the frustration it induces in the staff of DM agencies. Incremental testing leaves little room for breakthrough creative thinking. And an increasing number of agencies believe that their skills should be let loose on a broader range of marketing tasks, not just the generation of response.

Mel Stanley, planning director at DM media specialist MC&C, explains: “Clients are less keen to take risks nowadays. They do more modelling and as a result DM has become increasingly driven by response.” Predictability may appeal to clients, but it is not a word that creatives like.”

He adds: “The bane of creatives’ lives is that they are not allowed to do something really different. If the creatives do get charged up, the client changes it and you just end up with a straightforward piece.”

“Inventing and testing new creative work is partly about discovering new markets,” says Talking Numbers managing director Nigel Magson.

Each journey begins with a single step. By testing a new type of pack, a DM client might end up discovering a way to enter a new market. That it can also continue to pull in business from its original target market by using the control is one of the major merits of DM.

But it is also what irks many in the business. Poulter Partners head of direct marketing Fiona Hought says: “While there is clearly merit in tried-and-tested ‘banker communications’ that have been tweaked over a long period of time, without pushing the boundaries and taking a creative leap, what happens when those techniques stop working?”

This tension between modelling and forecasting from previous experience and making an intuitive creative leap is commonplace. Agencies often bend over backwards to try and prove that their creative idea is justified by historical data. Few succeed – just look at the post-rationalisation used in DM awards entries for evidence.

What’s in the oven?

Graham Dodridge, joint managing and creative director of business-to-business agency Gyro Communications, sees parallels to this issue in the world of cooking. “The tension between strategic and data planning and creative work is like the difference between Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver,” he says.

He adds: “Having gone through a downturn in the market, as money has become tighter, clients are looking for quantifiable results. So they follow the ‘Delia’ recipes because an agency can guarantee a certain level of response that way.”

But agencies identify themselves with Jamie, not Delia. “People can be stultified by the theory and data – they think it answers the problem for them. But you may end up processing out the character and those very human elements that inspire people to respond and purchase,” says Dodridge.

At a recent Royal Mail Media Forum, the issue of where DM is going was hotly debated. There was agreement among delegates that there is far less freedom to explore new ideas and take risks than in the past.

Dave Poole, chairman of agency DP&A, said: “A general conservatism is creeping in. There is too much emphasis on the data and research. We’re losing some of the exploration and art.”

Poole believes that part of the problem stems from the nature of new entrants into the DM industry. “DM has become a career with the cachet computer programming or accountancy used to have – fast career track, high salaries. It has attracted a lot of people who should not be there. They haven’t got the fire in the belly, they see it as about counting boxes,” says Poole.

Truth and beauty

Science does not have to preclude art, however. Even the human elements of marketing can be outlined in a theoretical model, but much of this learning has been forgotten in the rush to break free of perceived constraints.

As Holder points out: “There are five basic human motivations – love, pride, duty, self-preservation and gain. How many people know those? Yet a good ad should appeal to as many of them as possible.”

As agencies try to pull away from the theory, they risk falling into a new trap – losing the powerful techniques that made them successful in the first place. OgilvyOne Worldwide London executive creative director Rory Sutherland sees a paradoxical effect at work.

“People assume each medium has a stereotypical strength – that direct mail should be measured just on response levels, for instance. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you get obsessed with response rates and other impacts, such as awareness, are not measured,” he says.

Conversely, some media are now being measured by the wrong yardsticks. “That is why we are seeing the disappearance of long-copy press ads. If you measured them on response, you would use long copy, but because they are measured as if they are TV, you don’t.” To anybody claiming consumers don’t like long copy, Sutherland counters with the example of rap music artists such as Eminem, who tell coherent stories through their music.

As creative freedom has been eroded, data planning and analysis has taken its place. The problem is that you can model the latter but not the former. As Frood says: “There is no way you can box up great creative thinking and codify it into best practice.”

Such theorising is what has made DM great. But practitioners want to show their art, not the science. To do that, they need to find ways to prove that the impact of creative DM can be forecast as precisely as the data components. Paradoxically, that is exactly what the scientific direct marketers of the past were able to do.