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Zap! The direct mailer can then aim a solicitation at a letter box with a precision bordering on the scientific. While some people find the attention flattering, others consider it insidious. "There's something kind of creepy about companies knowing more about you than your own family, and compiling and trading information about you behind your back," says Robert Ellis Smith, editor of the watchdog newsletter Privacy Journal. Direct marketers strongly deny that they are intruders. "Nobody wants dossiers compiled about them," says Michael Manzari, president of Kleid Co., a New York City concern that brokers and manages lists. "We're not doing that. We're identifying markets." As a result of their care, goes the argument, less unwanted mail is inflicted on consumers. Says Katie Muldoon, president of a New York City direct-marketing agency: "If the mailbox is going to be crowded, we want to make sure it's stuff people want."
Still, direct mailers are growing more sensitive to consumer concerns about increasingly interwoven data bases. A few direct mailers refuse to rent their lists to other mailers. Among the holdouts: the Red Cross, Reader's Digest and AT&T, which posts close to 300 million pieces of promotional mail annually.
Some trade or offer names for rent but otherwise keep information about their customers under tight wraps. Lands' End offers no information about individuals when it passes on their names. "We are fanatical about keeping information about customers in the office," says Michael Atkin, the company's marketing vice president. The Time Inc. Magazine Co., which publishes TIME and sends out close to 35 million pieces of promotional mail each year, rents its customer lists. But they are made available only to buyers who agree to strict conditions, such as refusing to use telephone appeals for any of the acquired names. The company, like many others, will not rent a list until it sees and approves the proposed mailing.
Such safeguards help make the direct-mail flood more selective, but it is likely to continue to spread. In fact, the glut may grow exponentially as relatively cheap technologies increase the numbers of marketers who can tap into the stock of consumer information. Last month Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., introduced a Macintosh-compatible software data base culled from more than 7 million U.S. companies. The $695 package will enable small concerns to enter the business-to-business direct-market mainstream. Another Lotus data base, due early next year, will allow small businesses to tap into the consumer market as well. Says Henry Hoke Jr., publisher of Direct Marketing magazine: "It's brought the mailing-list business to Main Street."
Despite the scorn the pitches often elicit, there are indications that consumers don't mind the junk deluge as much as they sometimes say. A national survey released last June by Equifax found that direct-market mailings stimulated 54% of all Americans to make at least one purchase. One of every six Americans has made six or more purchases through the mail. By contrast, only 15% have bought at least one item through TV home-shopping clubs, and only 14% have responded to telephone solicitations.