Sailing through Uncharted Waters

How will current market conditions impact audience development?

By Robert Cohn
11/17/2008 -09:41 PM

Direct marketing is a discipline that has always depended on the ability to replicate results. As consumer marketing professionals, we have been able to rely on past performance, testing results, and offer and creative testing to forecast the expected results of our promotions.

The drastic changes—and swings—in the worldwide economy, the value of the stock market, and in consumer confidence about the future, however, causes me a lot of doubts about whether this will still be true in the fourth quarter of 2008 and going into 2009.

Will, for example, the suburban parents of a high school student be as willing to support their high school football team by buying a magazine subscription through a school plan promotion as they have in the past—knowing their carefully planned 401K investments are worth 30 percent less than two months ago?

Will subscribers who traditionally purchased gift subscriptions be as willing to buy magazines as a thoughtful holiday remembrance for neighbors, friends and relatives?
The expenditure for the gift—at current consumer magazine subscription prices—may not be significant to them, but what will their psychology be when they open the envelope from their favorite magazines soliciting a renewal of those gifts?

Will they think of cutting back—or will they agree with our sell copy and decide that magazine subscriptions are a cost-effective gift, a way to make their constrained budgets stretch further?

I write this as a Consumer Marketing Director who dropped a direct mail subscription solicitation, with important testing panels, one week before Congress first rejected the financial bailout plan and the stock market had the greatest one-week drop since 1929.

It is easy to see that some recipients who might otherwise have responded would have other things on their minds—and our flash counts showed us that they did. After one week of robust responses, the response dropped way below normal response curves the week of the stock market reduction, and did not recover.

The big question is: How projectable will those responses be in six months or a year?

Since nobody (that I know of anyhow) currently working in audience development or consumer marketing has lived through such an unpredictable economic environment, it makes me nervous about how any magazine subscription promotions will do during the next few months.

We’re in uncharted waters! Stay tuned to see how we come out.