Moron Marketers Rationalize Guessing Your Email Address

from the wake-up-already dept

And people wonder why marketers have a bad name. The Direct Marketing Association, which still hasn't figured out that annoying and intrusive marketing is bad marketing continues to try to rationalize why it endorses techniques that only help lazy marketers do a bad job. The point of good marketing is to find out what people want, and then provide it to them. The point of bad marketing is to push products people don't want on as many people as possible. Now, the Direct Marketing Association is saying it's okay for companies you buy from to try to figure out your email address and spam you, even if you didn't give them your address. They say it's okay for companies to buy lists or to even guess your email address, because they believe that you'd obviously want to hear from them, despite not giving them your contact info. When people point out that this is information that wasn't given to the companies, the DMA responds by saying the response rates when they ask for information is very low. Most normal thinkers would realize this probably means people don't want the companies to have their info. A good marketer, in fact, would realize exactly that (because the good marketer's job is to understand what people want and don't want). Instead, the bad marketers at the DMA believe that low response rates mean they have to figure out some other way to spam you.