The Following Companies Aren’t Getting It

August 6, 2008 • 9:39 pm • POSTED BY Jim Walls

Because of the business I’m in, it would by hypocritical of me to express my complete disdain for junk direct mail. After all, I’m certainly responsible for my fair share of it.

However, I strongly believe that if you stuff someone’s mailbox full of marketing, and they go well out of their way to ask you to PLEASE STOP MAILING ME THIS STUFF, then you should probably just stop. After all, why would you want to waste money sending advertisements to someone who clearly is not interested in your product? 

I have gone to great lengths to get my name off as many mailing lists as possible, some would argue to the point of obsession. I dutifully reply to every single one of those “opt-out” forms the credit card banks send. I’ve contacted the Direct Marketing Association to get off their list. I’ve even attended a local town council meeting on ways to curtail the bags of coupons that ADVO dumps on lawns nationwide—an act that brought out the crotchety 70-year-old in me. 

So imagine my Andy Rooney-like delight when I stumbled on Catalog Choice last fall. Everytime you get a magazine, you sign-in to your account and enter all the pertinent information, then they send a letter on your behalf to the publisher kindly asking them to remove you from their mailing list. All for free.

Did I use it? Absolutely. I mean, I haven’t even thumbed through a catalog in a decade. Since last October, I’ve opted out of an astonishing 77 individual catalogs—some of which were duplicates sent to us under as many as four different variations on names in my family.  Better yet, Catalog Choice tells you which companies agreed, which companies didn’t respond, and which companies—for some mind-boggling reason—actually wrote back to Catalog Choice to tell them “Sorry, we don’t care, and we’re going to keep pumping out these Patagonia catalogs until someone buys a damn fleece.” (Yes, Patagonia of all companies, is one of the companies that refuses to participate.)

So how well has it worked? Remarkably, some of the most relentless catalog mailers like Victoria’s Secret and J. Crew stopped almost immediately. Nice job, guys. For others, it took a couple of requests, all of which are tracked by date on Catalog Choice’s site. Then there are the catalogs shown above, all of which were received within the span of a single week last month, all of which I’ve attempted to opt-out of several times in the past 11 months. I’m looking at you, Crate & Barrel. What the hell? 

One of the things we remind our clients of all the time that a brand is more than a logo or a tagline or a color palette; it’s the sum of all interactions that someone has with a company. That applies to everything from how the lobby of your corporate headquarters is designed, to how people answer the phones, all the way down to how you handle people who respectfully ask to be removed from your mailing list. Why any retailer would go above and beyond to purposefully annoy people and ultimately damage their brand is stunning.  

(pictured (top row, l-r): Patagonia, Pottery Barn, King Arthur Flour, High Country Gardens, (middle) Sundance, Crate & Barrel, Gardener’s Supply Company, Fossil, Title Nine, (bottom)  Home Decorator’s Collection, CB2, Restoration Hardware, Eddie Bauer)