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Article: Reality Check.(direct mail sales and online shopping)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Nation's Cities Weekly
- Article date:
- November 29, 1999
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 National League of Cities. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"History does not repeat itself, it rhymes," wrote Mark Twain.
John Quelch, the Dean of the London Business School, recently made a comparison of mail-order sales to online shopping in a recent Harvard Business Review:
"Naysayers' reactions to the Net are similar to those we heard 15 or 20 years ago from the United States when direct mail catalogs started to become more prominent. One common preconception about direct mail was that it would work only with certain products. Another was that it was unreliable, that buying through the mail was too risky for consumers. Still another assumption was that if a retailer engaged in direct mail, catalog sales ...