Japan is the world's number two economy and the UK's number five, but one glance at the back pages of Precision Marketing today shows over 60 list owners selling their wares in the UK. Here, however, I can count the data vendors on the fingers of two hands.
For a country that has inspired so many science fiction writers, one would expect to find data on every subject imaginable.
In 2000, 13 per cent of all advertising expenditure in the US was attributed to direct mail (DMA website). For the same year in Japan it was a mere six per cent. Plus, there has been a lower reliance on direct mail as a medium, and the direct mail itself has been executed differently. Targeting or even caring about relevance seems to have limited appeal to a large portion of the current direct marketers in Japan.
How do we overcome this data deficit? The following are some of the tools open to us as direct marketers.
Alternative delivery methods: hand delivery, with on-the-spot personalisation, has proven to be good for small businesses. Geographical door drops are popular - although my mailbox looked like a trash can yesterday.
In-house lists: these have been a tradition in Japan for some time now.
To do this properly is a costly approach, fraught with troubles of data hygiene and over mailing, but still a definite solution.
Data swaps: requests are rife for data deals, and the opportunities are certainly out there for the cooperative corporation willing to swap data.
Piggyback mailers: adding your message to another's communication so far seems underutilised.
Proxies: for every selection criteria we want to make, there is a possible proxy we can use. With a careful eye on cost per acquisition and good database profiling, these proxies can serve us well.
And then there is the eternal pursuit of new data.
So what does the future hold? As the growth of direct mail and the importance of the direct marketing element of clients' marketing mix grows, there shall be a corresponding growth in the availability of quality data. The big global data players certainly see something in the Japan market.
Both Acxiom and Dun and Bradstreet are on the ground through local data vendor partners.
The rise of electronic direct mail and the changing of data laws will also impact the immediate future, but this is another story for another day.
As a direct marketer, I find the current data climate both frustrating and stimulating. The opportunities for the lateral-thinking marketer are immense. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of life provided by a data-rich terrain, but there is a something exciting about exploring in the desert.
