A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

CS: Specifically, what would some of these technologies be?
SD: Well, I think they’re more readily accessible these days online — things like internal search and automated merchandising, general segmentation and personalization of both the Web site and e-mail communications. We’re still trying to break out of the “We have X number e-mail file and every Tuesday and Friday we’re going to mail a message to them.” We want to make sure that we’re sending a valuable message that’s going to make them want to open it. And it’s relevant to them.
In terms of offline, we’ve seen some interesting things start to happen in regards with variable printing. We’ve just started to get our feet wet with that. I think that’s going to be something that’s moving forward at a fairly rapid pace. The quality is starting to be fairly good for that. And really kind of taking advantage of the ability to communicate differently to customer A vs. customer B in a mass marketing event, yet still retaining personalization.