ANSWERS TO DIRECT MARKETING QUESTIONS
The Amex Mail Order Catalog is an interesting concept of how to weed out potential mail order recipients who may not reply or order. The fact that Amex decided on a number of criteria from which to cull its list of 500,000 potential customers makes good economic sense. While many direct mail offers seem to get a response of maybe two or three percent, when sending out an expensive catalog, one has to raise the potential response. To do so, takes some careful digging. This means it requires more than buying a prospect list from a vendor, or using census data.
While the eventual list was based on household income, age of household head, his (or her) gender, and PRIZM classification (McDonald 378), surely there had to be other characterizations, inclusions and elimination of names. It would have been interesting to expand this section to include some of the preparations and the decisions on why these four formed the basis for the list of 500,000.
For example, if the head of household is female, one has to wonder if it means she has less time for shopping, and would like the convenience of ordering from a catalog. The annual household income would provide some insight into whether this is a working mother, someone living on alimony and child support, or whether there was wealth as the result of someone's bequest or other inheritance. I for one would have liked to see another criterion added: job. Was this a working mother, was the head of household, if male, self-employed, a business owner, investor, etc.?
What also was overlooked, although surely part of the PRIZM classification, was an ordering pattern. However, this segment of the text should have covered it again, not merely refer to Chapter 3. For example, simply because a potential target lives in a wealthy geographical area does not mean that that person is particularly responsive to mail order, or catalogs. In fa...