38 Business View Magazine - September 2016
very same ones who can remember when the original
Time Life Company first began marketing its media.
“We are a 50-plus marketer; our market is the Baby
Boomer and older,” he says. “It’s the largest-growing
population in the country and will be for the next ten-
plus years. So, by the time that folks are hitting their
fifties, they are really starting to feel nostalgic for the
times when they were in their teens and twenties.
That’s when people are aging into our demographic
target.”
And that demographic is constantly being aimed at
by Direct Holding’s 60-person staff, based in north-
ern Virginia. “The 60 people focus mainly on product
development and marketing,” says Hearing. “They
conceptualize the products; put terrific marketing
campaigns together; and then bring it to market via
all of our channels. We outsource operational areas
of the business; things like answering telephones,
running the website, warehousing, and shipping prod-
ucts; that’s all outsourced to third parties. So, the staff
here is really focused on one of two things – either the
creative pursuits of creating and marketing our prod-
ucts or managing third parties that handle operational
things for us.”
When asked about Direct Holdings Global’s compe-
tition, Hearing breaks down the company’s three di-
visions: “In terms of our nostalgic entertainment,
competition for selling sets of CDs or TV collections
is actually pretty limited,” he admits. “There are not
very many people that do that. But, we’re competing
with ITunes, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime, who are
delivering a lot of the same content. They’re deliver-
ing it digitally – we’re delivering it in physical format.
So, we do have competition in a digital delivery sense.
But you can get all sorts of different, ancillary products
only in a physical form - you can’t get them digitally.”
For example, Hearing says that the Carol Burnett Col-
lection comes with a companion book that can be au-
tographed by Burnett, herself.
“In our lifestyle business, there are definitely more
entrenched competitors out there in the multi-chan-
nel marketing space, so we do have pretty well-devel-
oped competition in that marketplace, Hearing says,
“whether it’s Euro-Pro, or Guthy-Renker. They’re major
players.”
“In the live entertainment, we are one of the biggest
that do themed music cruises,” he says. “There are
two or three others, but we’re in that top tier of com-
petitors in that marketplace. We launched the live
entertainment business seven years ago, and it has
doubled in size each of the last three years. And we’re
expecting it to double again, next year, and continue
to grow at a very rapid rate from that point forward.
