One blogger's crusade to rid the world of unwanted mail.
Who is this for?
Anyone who receives, and becomes irritated by, unwanted mail and wants to know what to do about it.
Why? (short version)
- It's annoying
- Life is too short to sift through unwanted mail
- We can reduce the use of paper by killing off junk mail
- Direct marketers need to innovate
- Less advertising material = less temptation = less material consumption
Why? (long version)
Beyond apathy: The problem with a lot of people who are annoyed by unwanted mail is that they don't care enough to do something about it. So every day they pick up their mail and throw half of it away because they can't be bothered attacking the problem at its source. This movement aims to motivate people into solving the unwanted mail problem with a minimum of effort.
No time: If only you could just grab the contents of your mailbox and be assured that it's all for you and your fellow residents and that it's all useful stuff. If you could cut down on the time it takes to sift through mail by reducing the amount of useless and unwanted mail then that time can be better spent thinking of calm blue oceans instead of wringing a direct marketer's neck*.
(* Thoughts resembling reality may occur)
Eco-friendly: The first tenet of environmental guardianship is REDUCE. So although you may recycle your unwanted mail it is, in fact, better to stop them printing this crud in the first place. Think of it as 'prevention better than cure' for the environment. I doubt that most marketers use environmentally friendly practices in their printing (double-sided post-consumer recycled paper with non-toxic ink). If a bunch of people started telling marketers to stop sending stuff, then this would equate to a reduction in demand for resources.
Innovate or die: Let's face it, direct mail marketing has a low yield, about a 2% response rate for untargeted campaigns. That means, for every 100 letters sent, 2 people respond. That doesn't even mean they necessarily buy, they might ring up and enquire. (And I'm not sure if me ringing up to ask them to take me off their list counts...). That means 98 people are wasting the marketer's resources. Surely there's a better way? Of course there's a better way!
But I'm not a marketing genius but I've noticed that when people take things voluntarily, there's a much better response rate. Think samples, or ads in publications or piggybacking off another product. I'm quite happy to flick through my local paper and look at the ads because the primary reason I pick it up is to read the articles. In comparison, unwanted mail just doesn't rate. It's lazy, it's boring. Marketing is supposed to be the new creative frontier and we're still getting snail mail? Go forth and innovate, dammit!
Resist temptation: Here's one for the shopaholics, like my mum. My mum loves catalogues. It means she can find out what she wants and know where to get it. The problem with this is she comes back from the shops and regrets buying so much stuff that she doesn't need. When I lived at home I started throwing out the catalogues before she got to them. It meant she couldn't find an excuse to go to the shops other than for groceries (and what happened during that trip was out of my control). It meant she wasn't being manipulated by marketing.
I felt manipulated in a different way. I used to look at catalogues and circle the things I wanted. Being a student, I didn't have much money so most of it remained out of my possession, but the lack of having things made me feel left behind. When I realised that this was part of the marketing psychology, I snapped out of it and have been anti-overconsumption since. Note, not anti-consumption, anti-overconsumption.
Anti-overconsumption also fits in with my earlier point about the 'reduce' tenet. The sooner we reduce unnecessary material consumption, the better for the environment.
Manifesto over. On with the other stuff...
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