Customer safety: direct marketing's undermarketed advantage

Abstract

In addition to products and services, the direct marketing transaction offers a commodity that is priceless: the customer's personal shopping safety. The potential for danger in today's store environment enables the direct marketer to highlight customer safety as a major distinguishing component of the direct product offering. The inherent customer safety of the direct marketing transaction is vital to society. It is also a feature which, if optimally marketed, offers profit potential whose magnitude may not have existed since Ward, Sears, and Roebuck made shopping available to rural America. Thus, the direct marketer has an immense opportunity and obligation to educate consumers to insist on personal shopping safety as a key purchase criterion. Discussed are marketplace danger and how retailers are addressing it, opportunities and obligations for direct marketers, the theory and practice of marketing the direct shopping safety advantage, and two examples of approaches to creating safety advantage messages. Eighteen research hypotheses are presented, as is a table of nine topics for future study.