International Direct Marketing

13 Pages 3239 Words

owever, despite the high spending Europeans are not that bombarded with direct mail as US citizens. Europeans seeing direct buying as a great way to achieve price, value and deals that they could not achieve in local stores can explain this.
A further reason for direct marketing’s acceptance in the EU may be the opening hours of European stores. Many stores keep hours and service levels that Americans would find unacceptable (Plotting your global strategy, Hengst R., Direct Marketing, Vol.63, Issue 4, August 2000). In Germany, for example, stores are closed between 1pm and 2pm and after 6.30pm and every Sunday.

Companies that have a thorough knowledge about individual customer needs and characteristics are able to customize offers, messages, delivery modes and payment methods to maximize the customer value and satisfaction (Armstrong and Kotler, 2000).
In order to do so, they use the customer database.


II.1 Customer Database

The customer database is a collection of comprehensive data about individual customers or prospects, whi...