Direct marketing gives the consumer wonderful control. You can sit in your living room at 2 a.m. and shop in a catalog or on the Internet. So you get great ability to deal with time. Secondly, as we get more and more variety in goods, you develop a better market for specialty items. You certainly couldn't have a store of sandpaper, and you couldn't have all the types of sandpaper available in most stores.
Direct marketing is a wonderful tool to bring a huge variety of products to interested people.
There's a third area that I think is relevant, and that is the globalization of marketing in general. We're witnessing the advent of a truly global marketplace. Big companies have been into global marketing concepts for a while, but now we have an opportunity for the smallest companies to get into business on a global basis. The marketplace is changing big time, simply because there are no longer the geographic barriers that existed. And direct marketers are the first to go in and take advantage of that.