Advantage Count

Bertelsmann launches marketing offensiveDirectGroup Bertelsmann relaunches its book club business in Germany, introduces specialty clubs and has acquired the e-mail marketing provider zooba.com with 2.3 million subscribers in the USA. In addition, tennis star Stefanie Graf is to support the book clubs' marketing offensive as a media partner of the German clubs. Graf, who is described as a "heavy user" when it comes to media, is to realize a book, a CD-Rom and an audiovisual project for Bertelsmann in the fitness/wellness sector. Graf admitted at the Leipzig Book Fair that her favorite books are autobiographies. In his marketing offensive, DirectGroup CEO Klaus Eierhoff is focusing on the expansion of specialty clubs worldwide, which he says are currently gaining around 200,000 new members per month via the Internet in the USA. According to Bertelsmann, the online sales generated by book clubs worldwide already amount to around 150 million marks.
The acquisition of zooba
.com is part of DirectGroup's new multichannel strategy. Bertelsmann will use Zooba.com as a content channel with which individualized
emails can be sent as a sales tool to acquire new customers. For Eierhoff, the aim is to meet the multi-optional customer on all of their purchasing channels. Bertelsmann is thus linking the new with the old economy. Because "pure online providers will have difficulties if they do not serve additional sales channels," said Eierhoff. Bertelsmann, at home in both "economies", has quickly noticed in the USA that the proportion of multichannel customers is increasing. Carlo Bernasconi