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A U.S. Postal Service survey of 5,000 families made two years ago found that 60.3% of respondents did not mind getting "advertising mail" that did not interest them, so long as the pile included some pieces that caught their eye. Not surprisingly, households with incomes of $65,000 and up received more of this mail than other income groups -- and also wanted less. Although the elderly, particularly the homebound, often rely on mail-order shopping, the over-70 crowd felt that they received too much advertising mail. Younger consumers tended to want more.
Some peeves cut across all demographic lines. One typical complaint is that checks, credit cards and other valuables can get lost in the mounds of paper that consumers toss out daily. Another common gripe: duplicate mailings. While some of the replication is carelessness on the part of direct mailers, the overlap is testimony to the number of times that consumers' names are bought and sold in the direct-mail marketplace. Many consumers also resent notices ! advising them that they have been preapproved for a credit card. "How do they know that I'm a sound credit risk?" they wonder.
Consumer resistance to direct mail appears to be rising. Last May the New York Telephone Co. enclosed a form in the monthly bills for its 6.3 million residential customers, asking if they wanted their names removed from a list that it intended to rent to other direct mailers. A surprising 800,000 people wrote to demand that they be removed from the offering. The 3,500-member Direct Marketing Association, a group that has been monitoring, boosting and charting the industry since 1917, reports that more than 1 million people have signed up for a service that aims to eliminate subscribers' names from national direct-mail lists.
Sensing the backlash, direct mailers are beginning to rethink their more profligate tactics. "People simply don't have the time to sift through a lot of unwanted and unnecessary pieces of mail," says Bill Davis, who runs the Database Marketing Corp. in Burlington, Mass. "If you treat your own customers with a sort of throw-it-against-the-wall-and-hope-a-little-of-it- sticks approach, you're actually alienating them." There is also a new economic reason to reassess the scope of the mail flow. Next February postal hikes could raise third-class costs by as much as 33%. (The current rates provide the Postal Service with revenues of $8.1 billion; additional revenues are generated when customers send in their checks and receive their purchases through the mail.)
Direct mailers who want to demonstrate their sensitivity to environmental concerns about the mail volume might emulate Smith & Hawken, a San Francisco Bay Area business that markets specialty garden tools. Since its founding 11 years ago, the company has donated 10% of its pretax profits to environmental causes. Last year 80% of the company's $50 million in sales was generated by orders placed through 20 million nonrecyclable catalogs. Co-founder Paul Hawken decided that a greater effort was needed. He has publicly pledged to print all Smith & Hawken catalogs on recycled paper, use only soy-based inks and plant two trees for every one cut down in S&H's publishing effort. He has further promised to let customers know to whom S&H rents its lists and to offer them a chance to remove their names from the rolls.