Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: This liberal translation of the famous Victor Hugo quote applies to direct marketing as it exists today. Only 20 years ago, direct marketing was considered a speciality employed by book publishers, record clubs or magazine publishers seeking subscriptions. Meanwhile direct marketing has become a marketing tool utilised by more than half the U.S. Fortune 500 companies. Realising the growing importance of direct marketing in addition to traditional advertising, major advertising agencies such as Young & Rubican (Y&R) and Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) purchased the most famous specialised agencies in this field and worked with them to bring both general and direct marketing clients the combined expertise of both disciplines. Due to direct marketing s success it is now the basis for various subdisciplines. Database marketing, relationship marketing, one-to-one marketing, integrated marketing, and others all offer interesting extensions and variations of direct marketing s basic techniques. More and more companies, in Europe and the United States, are using direct marketing as one part of their overall marketing mix. But even with enormous advances in analytical and computer capabilities, many direct marketing attempts fail to achieve their potential or, worse, fail to work at all due to a misunderstanding of their advantages and disadvantages. Therefore the aim of this thesis will be to examine the characteristics of direct mail, outbound telemarketing and online direct marketing, and to explore their specific advantages & disadvantages in order to enable their effective utilisation in todays' business world. At the beginning of this thesis direct marketing s evolution and development over time will be analysed. The thesis continues with a description of these three direct marketing media and an evaluation of their respective advantages and disadvantages under the headings of communication, privacy, design and media. These four categories have been chosen, because they are the most important elements for the future of successful direct marketing. After analysing the current situation the future prospects of the three direct marketing media will be demonstrated by examining how their various characteristics fit into the future. Finally a case study was conducted to determine to which degree the analysed arguments were applicable. This is examined in the case of Roba Baumann GmbH, a wholesaler which produces children s [...]