In 1973, Bradford founder J. Roderick Mac Arthur began importing plates from France, selling them to collectors and dealers. As the popularity of collector's plates grew, he decided to organize the market by developing a medium for buying and selling the most actively traded issues.
Today, Bradford operates the world's largest trading center for limited-edition collector's plates, where brokers handle transactions between buyers and sellers. A leader in the direct marketing of collector's plates, Bradford has developed and marketed hundreds of series, from plates illustrated with scenes from "Gone with the Wind" to others featuring work by artists from China, Russia, and Egypt.
The Bradford Exchange is a good example of a company that sells its products primarily through direct marketing media. While it generates sales through space advertising and direct mail, other companies also market through television, radio, package inserts, or any number of media. Unlike catalogs that offer a spectrum of merchandise, these promotions focus on one or two products at a time. For example,
- Omaha Steaks offers choice gourmet meats, sea-foods, and hors d'oeuvres to consumers and businesses.
- Wolferman's English muffins airlift a dozen varieties of baked goods to breakfast enthusiasts.
- Photo-processing companies offer off-price photo-finishing services with competitive turnaround.
In the business-to-business market, companies sell products and services to businesses through the people who buy for those businesses. The U.S. Postal Service estimates that about 30 percent of all direct mail advertising is sent to businesses. Because of the steep rise in the cost of personal sales calls, direct marketing is becoming a more popular way to market products and services to businesses. Today, direct marketing is used to sell computer supplies and accessories, electronics, office supplies, educational material, books, newsletters, and magazines, checks, and specialty business forms.
Some business-to-business companies sell only through direct marketing; others have established a direct marketing arm that supplements their traditional business. Hewlett Packard and IBM, for example, both have divisions that sell their equipment to businesses via mail order.
Many of the techniques used to reach businesspeople resemble those used to sell to consumers at home. "A person doesn't change that much when he or she takes off a jogging outfit, puts on a business suit, and heads to the office," notes Jim Kobs. "The main difference is that business buyers are spending company money, not their own. And in the case of many small businesses where the owner is the decision maker, they are also spending their own money in an office setting."
Businesses also use direct marketing programs to generate leads. A telecommunications company like Sprint uses direct marketing to solicit new business subscribers. A small business may seek new clients, like the advertising agency that sent a boxed shoe to twenty-five new prospects a week, with a package headlined "Now that we've gotten a shoe in the door." But most business-to-business sales take place through catalogs, which will be examined in chapter 3.
THE ADVANTAGES OF STARTING IN A DIRECT MARKETING COMPANY
According to widespread industry sentiment, the best place to launch a career is on clients' accounts in a direct marketing company or a direct marketing division.
Working on the "client side" can give you a complete education in running a direct marketing program. You can learn everything from targeting an audience and developing a marketing strategy to constructing an offer, creating and producing a package, and maximizing the value of your customers in the "back end."
Knowledge of these phases of the direct marketing cycle is an asset no matter what corner of the industry you end up in. Claude Hopkins, inventor of many of today' s direct marketing techniques, began by writing copy for the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company, where his first sales letter inspired 1,000 orders, the first the company had ever made by mail order. Before he founded the direct marketing agency Stone & Adler, Bob Stone sold surgical bandages by mail to first-aid departments of manufacturing companies, and later oversaw all direct mail for a business publishing firm. These aren't isolated examples. A whole host of direct marketing luminaries began on the client side.
POSITIONS IN DIRECT MARKETING COMPANIES
Marketing
Direct marketing companies offer challenging positions in marketing and advertising. In marketing, a common entry level position is that of marketing assistant. At the Bradford Exchange, marketing assistants handle administrative and reporting work for product managers, but are also given some responsibility for marketing Bradford's lower volume lines.
Bradford's assistant product managers assume complete responsibility for marketing medium-volume lines to current and new customers. This entails planning, developing, executing, and analyzing new direct response campaigns, expanding the customer base, and projecting and monitoring sales volume and expenses.
At Bradford, product managers and senior product managers have complete marketing responsibility for one or more top-selling lines of plates, as well as supervisory and management responsibility for their subordinates. Generally, the higher up the product management ladder one goes, the more involved a person gets in company-wide strategy and management issues.
Managing a product line entails the following:
- Deciding price points
- Constructing offers and guarantees
- Determining mailing schedules and markets
- Tracking and analyzing sales trends
- Looking at response and making any necessary modifications to marketing plans and programs
- Working with media people to choose media vehicles that will attract new prospects
- Trying to discover more information about the market, its characteristics, and its potential, using the research department's skills
- Working with creative staff to come up with a marketing strategy that can be executed creatively and effectively
- Working with letter-shop people to make sure that deadlines are met and mailings go out on schedule
- Calculating profit and loss on mailings
The in-house list manager manages the house file, the database that contains buying histories and demographic profiles of all current customers. The list manager maintains the database, enhances it with additional demographic data as needed, and promotes it to list brokers and other direct marketing companies that wish to offer a noncompeting product or service.
At the Bradford Exchange, marketers who are charged with expanding the customer base work in the new customer acquisition department. These professionals devise promotional campaigns that will bring new clients to Bradford's house file, researching and purchasing outside media such as magazines, Sunday newspaper magazines, television, package inserts, catalogs, and some outside lists. One important method of acquiring new customers is advertising selected series in the "seven sisters" of the service magazine industry: Redbook, McCall's, Better Homes and Garden, Woman's Day, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Family Circle. Prospects who return coupons are added to Bradford's house file and are regularly notified when new issues and new series are available.
At Bradford, new product development staffs are called program managers. They draw upon their fine arts educations to create concepts for new collectible plate series, and then seek out complementary artists, develop sketches, and work with marketing staff to test collector interest in the new series. Series with potential go into production. Bradford's program managers work with producers to assure that plates meet high quality standards, and collaborate with marketing staff to plan plates' introduction into the collectibles market.
Creative Writers, artists, and designers build the creative campaigns that are used to solicit customers. They work hand-in-hand with the marketing staff, who present the creative staff with a profile of a market, information about the product, and a marketing platform or strategy from which to generate ideas for the creative presentation.
Proofreaders and editors check all copy before it is laid out, and proof it again before it goes to the printer. At the Bradford Exchange, proofreaders and editors who are interested in becoming copywriters are given small writing projects to try their hand at. Those who display a real gift for copy can move up, along with copywriter trainees who are challenged to write copy for products as soon as they are hired, albeit for less-profitable lines.
Copywriters are charged with creating effective, product-specific copy that persuades prospective customers to make a purchase. Early in their company careers, copywriters may focus on smaller projects, while senior copywriters handle projects for important, high-volume products or services. But regardless of their position on the career ladder, copywriters must choose the right voice for each product, and craft convincing, persuasive copy that effectively covers the marketing and creative platform devised by the marketing team.
"To realize that one of your ideas, something you wrote and helped to create, may have made a very profitable difference in response, or even just convinced one more person to buy a plate-that's very satisfying for a writer," notes Dave Gallagher, a senior writer at Bradford. "You know that people all over the world are reading your work and liking it."
Writing copy means knowing everything about the product you are promoting and the people you are promoting it to. "No salesman would dare knock on doors without first learning all about his product. How it works. How it's made. How it differs from competing products," creative expert Martin Gross once reminded copywriters. At a company like Bradford Exchange, where copywriters are assigned specific series, immersing oneself in a line's products and customers is both a possibility and a requirement. (In direct marketing agencies, where copywriters bounce from project to project, becoming well versed in a product can be harder.)
Art directors are charged with making a package or ad succeed visually, by taking a concept and copy and
- Illustrating it.
- Choosing a clear type face and designing type blocks.
- Choosing headline faces.
- Providing input on paper stock and ink colors.
- coordinating the "look" of every component in a direct mail package, from the brochure and the letter to the order form, outer envelope, and buck slip (a separate slip attached to a piece).
Traffic coordinators schedule the production of jobs and handle the administrative duties that, neglected, can derail a project: staying on top of paperwork, making sure writers and art directors meet their deadlines, and routing copy, art, and mechanicals for approval. In some companies, traffic coordinator is an entry-level job with a future, but in others, it's not even a rung on the career ladder.
ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
At the larger direct marketing companies, new employees can take advantage of structured training programs that acquaint them with the skills they need on the job. Bradford's Marketing Assistant Trainee Program fosters general management skills and allows entry-level personnel to test their abilities in marketing before they assume responsibility for a line. Marketing Assistants in the program usually recent business or marketing graduates recruited on campus-develop or refine
- A basic understanding of direct marketing principles.
- An ability to apply analytical direct marketing concepts to real marketing problems, using statistics, testing, and computer analysis.
- Knowledge of Bradford's organization, concept, customers, products, promotions, house file segmentation system, and the lists and media used to acquire new customers.
- Skills in organization, decision making, interpersonal communications, budgeting, computer systems, and written reports and oral presentations.
Once marketing assistants complete their training, their promotions can be rapid, notes Dee Freund, Bradford's employment manager. Assistant Product Manager Stacey McCormick is a case in point.
As a marketing major at Northern Illinois University, Stacey was only vaguely acquainted with direct marketing. "I didn't know I wanted to go into direct marketing until I interviewed with a Bradford recruiter on campus," she recalls. Learning about Bradford's Marketing Assistant training program and the appealing position it led to helped her make up her mind. "I wanted a position in account or product management, something that would let me control something, actually makes it happen." After two years at Bradford, she hasn't been disappointed.
As an assistant product manager, she manages sixteen collectible-plate lines. Two of her lines commemorate Elvis Presley, lb learn more about Elvis customers, she has traveled to Graceland, Elvis's Memphis home, to see what kinds of memorabilia Graceland visitors purchase. She followed the Elvis postage-stamp controversy closely to determine which image of Elvis most appealed to his fans, the best market for her products.
Understanding the profile of Bradford "clients" is a priority at Bradford, which first assigned Stacey to its Client Services department. As she monitored client mail and answered telephone queries, she learned first-hand what clients like, dislike, and are upset by. "Working in client services taught me a lot about who is in our house file. That knowledge helps me market my series to Bradford customers."
It's Stacey's job to keep Bradford clients happy. At the front end (before an order is placed), she works closely with the creative department on the letters and fliers that promote new issues to current buyers of a series. She also stays in touch with Bradford's letter shop coordinator to make sure she has enough inventory of each component in a direct mail package (in other words, enough sales letters, brochures, reply cards, and outer envelopes to make a complete promotional package) and to make sure that mailings "drop" on time.
At the back end (after an order is received), Stacey makes sure that her products are available when mailings drop, so that customers can receive their goods promptly. She also analyzes the response to each mailing. When response falls off, she figures out why. It's her responsibility to determine whether the problem is the product, the promotion, the offer, or an external factor like a prominent world event that has stolen consumer attention away from the mailbox.
Stacey also participates in Bradford teams charged with developing new products. These teams of marketing, creative, and media people collaborate with Bradford's product developers to create a new base of prospective clients for a new collectible plate series.
"In my job, my analytical skills get a real workout. But to me, the numbers I work with really mean something. They have implications for my inventory levels, my sales trends, and future responses to subsequent plates in my series."
When she has a spare moment, Stacey works on projects aimed at improving Bradford's products and marketing strategies. 'These projects really give employees like me a chance to shine. It's an opportunity to show off what you know outside your particular responsibilities."
Stacey McCormick is happily anticipating a long career at Bradford, where a clear ladder of opportunities, real responsibility, and a stimulating, positive environment add up to nothing less than a dream job. "I'm grateful that Bradford has given me so much responsibility so early in my career. But then Bradford trains you well, prepares you well, and constantly challenges you to do better."
