Your Trust - GMS History

General Marketing Solutions has been helping our clients increase market share for the past two decades. From the very beginning, GMS has concentrated on innovative solutions that customize our clients’ messages to their markets.

Building on years of experience in direct marketing and data management, Jim Thomson formed General Marketing Services in 1988 to provide high quality Direct Marketing to the financial publications industry. Partnering with a variety of vendors, GMS provided the most effective solutions to our clients. Before recent software and hardware improvements were widely available, GMS developed early target market profiling models that quickly delivered astounding results for our clients.

This success, combined with our dedication to delivering the best service experience, initiated GMS’s ongoing commitment to continually add industry-leading capabilities as in-house solutions. Printing, direct mail personalization and processing, lettershop, warehousing and distribution, data processing, list procurement, and technology tools grew as capabilities with our list of successful clients.

While continuing our work with financial, retail, service and distribution businesses, we kept our eyes on the horizon and saw a high-tech angle that was the wave of the future. Our commitment to continually offer capabilities that maximize marketing dollars prompted the search for innovative technology solutions.

At the same time, Frank Pikala (co-founder of Turnkey Marketing) was working on the high-tech side of the marketing industry. He was applying his years of experience to developing applications and processes for web-
based marketing solutions and customized data analysis. With the goal of delivering the most effective high-tech marketing capabilities to clients such as Piper Jaffray, Northwest Airlines, American Express (now Ameriprise) and Draftfcb, to name just a few, Turnkey Marketing was formed in 1996.

General Marketing Services and Turnkey Marketing quickly forged a strategic partnership to take full advantage of our complementary capabilities. One of the great innovations of the time was highly improved digital printing, allowing affordable production of high-quality marketing pieces with fully customizable features. Fortune 500 companies as well as small and medium-sized businesses with their eye on message and budget maximization sought out GMS and Turnkey as their ideal solutions partners.

Since then, variable color printing has ushered in the age of Channel Marketing. The confluence of technology and production continually offers improved custom-solutions capabilities. GMS can help find your prospect AND tell you all about them, including how they’ll buy and what vehicles they’ll respond to, capturing and analyzing their response and adding custom fulfillment. Once again, GMS is at the forefront, applying our years of industry experience and Turnkey’s innovative programming capabilities to form new solutions previously only dreamed of.

In March of 2008, General Marketing Services and Turnkey Marketing merged to become the new GENERAL MARKETING SOLUTIONS. The new General Marketing Solutions is uniquely positioned to provide you a wider selection of services to meet your corporate goals. In addition to our always reliable production capabilities and the most productive service experience, GMS’s newest products, like Web Direct, promise to put you in control with web-enabled pre-production, powerful new data-processing technologies and innovative communication techniques that deliver your message at production rate costs and speeds. These capabilities allow the new GMS to position you even further ahead of the industry curve.

Our commitment is to apply the most effective tools available to continually provide powerful solutions to meet your corporate marketing goals. Thank you for choosing General Marketing Solutions as your marketing solutions partner.