Can Database Marketing Work for Catalogers? (1,457 words)

Massive exchange of names. North America is about the only place in the world where you can rent names of mail order buyers. Almost everywhere else, marketers hold customer names in an Al Gore "lock box." My wife, Helena, is an avid catalog shopper. She gets from eight to 10 catalogs a day, all year long. She loves them, reading every page of every book as if they were novels. As soon as she places an order, the cataloger immediately rents her name out to 50 or 60 other competitors who rush to fill our mailbox. Without this universal name exchange, the catalog industry would soon die.