The prognosis for global clicks-and-mortar convergence was rather dire at the 83rd Direct Marketing Association annual conference — which is saying something, considering that this was where e-commerce and one-to-one marketing gurus had gathered to assess the state-of-the-art in web-based consumerism. Officially, of course, conferees boasted about the soon-to-be billion Internet users, and celebrated “The End of Business as Usual,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto author Christopher Locke put it. In his keynote address, DMA President H. Robert Wientzen even invoked a “Web-O-Rama!” and told his audience that “we have an amazing talent for adapting to the new!”
But in fact, our correspondent reports that the “end of business as usual” seemed all too near for a few direct-to-consumer strategists in the audience. First, there were jitters in the wake of Williams-Sonoma’s 30% stock plunge last month on news of flagging catalog sales and rising costs. Despite a bullish approach to its book program (see last month’s PT), sales were down for all catalogs, a drop linked to a dip in consumer purchases. (It didn’t help matters any that CFO John Tate jumped ship to take a post at Krispy Kreme.) Then the Federated department store empire announced layoffs in its Fingerhut catalog unit. The company will cut 25% of the Fingerhut work force, which supports Internet orders for Wal-Mart, and had been expected to aid the e-commerce sites for Federated units Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.
Book publishing seemed even lower on the DMA radar than last year, though it did pop up here and there. In his presentation on “Writing for Eyeballs,” for example, design maven Otis Maxwell looked at the creation of e-commerce communities, comparing the websites for textbook retailers Bigwords and VarsityBooks. He found the former chock full of “value-added features” (the front page changes constantly, a free online magazine offers “content for the discontent,” and there’s a handy “big word” dictionary). VarsityBooks, on the other hand, was “based around selling textbooks, not building a relationship,” and its interactive features were designed to help the retailer rather than engage customers. The upshot was that far fewer people had heard of VarsityBooks than Bigwords prior to visiting the sites, and after viewing, 56% of users preferred Bigwords. Perhaps that’s why Varsity Group recently rebranded itself as a campus marketing juggernaut that will target college students for other companies, and junked its contract with ICQ. Elsewhere, Maxwell pointed out that “soft offers” are perfect for the web, because they’re great for building opt-in lists, and customers actually give you their correct contact information (hoping they’ll win a product or service), so you can hit them up later.
