Columbia House Starts a Positive-Option Club

Columbia House has introduced “Play,” its first music club to operate on a positive-option basis rather than the negative option most often used by such clubs.

Negative-option clubs send products to customers unless they specifically decline them. Positive-option arrangements, less common in direct marketing, require customers to order before receiving anything.

Last month Columbia House, New York, began a massive multimedia DM campaign to promote this club both to its house file and outside prospects, notes chairman and chief executive Richard Wolter.

Those efforts consist of direct response broadcast and cable television, a near-40-million-piece mailing, DR space in magazines like TV Guide and Rolling Stone and a Web-based campaign.

Columbia House will target mailings to customer segments based on past purchase history.

“This is the club of the future,” Wolter says. “With negative-option clubs, people have to adjust their schedules around them, and they generate so many returns”-reportedly almost 50% for some clubs.

Wolter notes that Columbia House had been testing the positive-option idea for the past two years and felt it could make such a club work this time, though he conceded record clubs have tried positive option before with disappointing results.

Other continuities register mixed reactions. For New York-based Book-of-the-Month Club, positive-option terms can sometimes work, but only if they are aimed at specific demographic groups, says spokeswoman Coleen Murphy. Since the BOMC, which has been using negative option for 70 years, just posted a record year, a move toward positive option seems highly unlikely.

But Marty Grossman, senior vice president of marketing at Grolier Books, Danbury, CT, isn’t quite so doctrinaire. While he says his company is sticking with its negative-option formula for now, “We’re looking at what Columbia House is doing very closely,” he says. “It is radical and we’re very interested to see how well they do with it.” He notes companies using positive option can reduce their bad-debt problems since they’re not shipping products without consent. This, however, creates more pressure on promotion departments to make their book and record offers more appealing to customers.

What’s more, Grossman points out that positive-option clubs can make consumers feel more in control than traditional ship-’til-forbid book and music clubs.

“People don’t like to be told what to do,” he says.