Anybody get "misread" by marketers?

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Ok, ever since I got on the mailing list for a clothing store dedicated to big and tall men, I've been getting weird mailings. I keep getting catalogs from a sports betting website called BetUS.com, despite the fact that I'm not interested in sports or gambling. Then today, I got a "welcome issue" from "American Baby", a magazine for expectant mothers! I'm not married and I don't have a baby in my future, so I have no clue who decided I was an expectant father.

Apparently the big and tall store sold its lists to a marketing company with a certain profile of male in mind, and ever since I've been getting mailings targeted towards sort of a urban redneck type male, even though I'm not. My parents get some good laughs from the stuff that arrives for me in the mail, but I'm just frustrated.

How come I have to give my name, mailing address, phone number, and email address to every place I buy something from, as a requirement of doing business with them, only to be inundated with junk mail that many times I'm not interested in? All I want to do is transact business without being marketed to all the time. It reminds me of Minority Report, where electronic billboards read Tom Cruise's character's eyes and blast personalized ads at him, and he has to get a back alley eye transplant to hide.

I once got a letter from TD Bank, addressing me by the opposite gender.

It does get pretty bad, and it happens to everyone.

I had the most fun when the political party I am NOT a member of choose to assume I must share their affiliation because of other memberships, and sent me a lovely autographed photo of the man who was president at the time. I had a couple of co-workers desperately trying to get it from me; one who thought I should be proud of it, and one who wanted it for ... dart practice.

It is always weird being invited to join AARP at age 30.

And so on.

Unfortunately, targeted mailing isn't exactly perfectly targeted. Maybe it is just too cheap to send out excess paper in today's world.

And email, of course, is worse.

All of which goes to prove that anyone trying to judge you by your incoming mail is going to be woefully misinformed.

They usually need that information to process a credit or debit charge and to ship your purchases, and some of them have an extra place to checkmark whether you do or do not want to receive "special offers" or whatever from them or from others. But in some cases, I have made phone calls or even written letters to get removed from certain mailing lists.

before reading the post i figured you meant on the phone, where i dispense with them very quickly.

i opt out of everything. i'm sure everyone gets bad junk mail. i can't stand it though. junk mail enrages me, and menus left on my door. and ads stickered onto or wrapping the front page of the newspaper. and flyers left on my car. you can't get away from advertising. it is everywhere. it comes to you. want to install adblock on my life. no kidding - i am angry about this every day.

haha that's actually pretty funny.



I hear you on that. I get a ton of junk mail. It's not the personally targeted stuff, just piles of "sale" and "specials" flyers. It's ridiculous because 99.9% of it goes straight into my paper recycle bin. What a waste.

As for mailing lists - I don't join them. I also refuse to give my postal code to cashiers when they ask for it, which is another targeted marketing ploy. Not only is it none of their business, I also don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry in line behind me knowing what block I live on.

I have a credit card but use it rarely. I don't like being tracked and pay cash for almost everything.

I don't think it has anything to do with you, it's just marketers doing a bad job of reaching their target audience.

Personally, the concept of marketing is a bit odd to me. I have a hard time accepting that products are successful because people are convinced to buy them via the company's advertising, rather than by word of mouth, or by the merits of the product's own quality. I either already know I like (or will like) something, or I do the research myself. With rare exceptions, it has little to do with me accepting the direct marketing from the company itself, and honestly I just don't understand how this can be so effective with so many people. Not to mention, you should know that the company would only say positive things about itself and its products or services. The whole concept just doesn't make much sense with my way of thinking.

I used to be like this. I now use it as an opportunity to have some fun!

Often I will 'go and get my mother' when phoned, will make them wait 2 minutes with weird background noises to keep them entertained, if they are still on the line after 2 minutes I will pretend to be a crazy old lady, finally my original voice will return, and I will tell them to get a real job and stop wasting peoples time

On the street when approached by salespeople I will wind them up with bizarre behaviour, only to finish the same, 'go and get a real job instead of wasting peoples time'

Its called 'carpet bombing' I think the term originated with the Vietnam war*. Basically meaning, if you're not sure exactly where your target is within a given area, raze the whole area to the ground and you can't miss the target. Whatever else you hit in the process is known as 'collateral damage' - in the case of this kind of marketing that would be several thousand trees.



Well, you would think that any reasonably intelligent person would do things that way, but the term 'reasonable intelligence' brings to mind a concurrent thread about the meaning of the term 'common sense' - both things you hear about a lot, but rarely actually witness.

Most advertising and marketing rests on the concept of Pavlov's Dogs - that if you condition them with the bell long enough, by associating it with food, eventually you can make them salivate just by ringing a bell.

Thus all the beautiful, sexual, glamorous imagery in advertising, the verbal hyperbole like the incessant use of terms like NEW and IMPROVED and GREAT and AMAZING et cetera et cetera... The idea is, that if you pound your name and logo into their brains while associating it with attractive images, when the time comes to make a purchase, they'll be so preconditioned, they'll do it with minimal conscious, critical thought, through sheer impulse based on those images.

And the statistics supporting the reliability of this technique are frightening. People are such tools.




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*Nope - according to Wikipedia, the concept originated just prior to WWII - my bad.

My pet peeve is when Amazon sends me an e-mail saying they have recommendations for me, but the things they have personally recommended me are SO not me! I mean, some of the chic-flicky films they think I want to watch I think in my case, as I am a female, they just assume that my tastes are the same as the majority of females of my age- (or at least, what they *perceive* to be the majority). It just irritates me, because they use my name and say they have personal recommendations for me. I order quite a few books on Amazon, and even still, they don´t seem to be able to figure out what it is I like to read! Though occasionally, they get it right.

My guess is that, for the OP, it´s something similar: they have assumed you are like "the masses", when you are not like that at all. But this type of advertising might work for other people, which is why they try it on you.

Oh, and what´s funny is that I even receive ads for Viagra on Skype. I´ve gotten some ads telling me how I can enlarge my penis size, too- (they don´t seem to mind the fact that I have no penis )

I know, right?! I used to put my junk mail back into the mailbox with "return to sender" written on it. Sometimes it worked, depending on who the mail carrier was, but most of the time, I make a stop at the dumpster on the way from the boxes to my apartment.

I think I've mentioned this before elsewhere, but Alex's interview here with Tyler Cowen, the author of Create Your Own Economy, suggests that people with AS are less susceptible to advertising, which is (as Willard pointed out) based almost entirely on emotions and not hard facts.

It only stands to reason that we also give off poor advertising signals. Facebook was designed to capture marketing and demographic information about its users, and I always get weird ads from them that I would never even consider clicking on. Facebook, however, along with Hulu and some other demographic gathering sites, will allow you to customize your advertising experience, by "liking" or "deleting" certain ads until you have customized your own ad experience and helped the marketers to better target you.

If that idea appeals to you (it doesn't really move me either way - I've reluctantly accepted it by now), just wait... it will either be applied to mail marketing soon, or mail marketing will go away entirely in favor of the net. :LOL:

I keep getting Cosmo magazines in the mail...Why couldn't it be Playboy?

that sounds reasonable, but i still can't figure out why everyone else is susceptible. if anything i'm less likely to buy something i've seen advertised because i'm annoyed by the advertising. this isn't to say there's no way to appeal to my emotions, as i'm sure there is but if there's no logic underlying it, i won't be giving it much regard.



adblock shuts most of that up. prior to installing it i was in & out of facebook many times a day while i was playing a game on the site (until i realized most of the games there are really just designed to irritate you to the point of spending money to earn privilege points) and in fact i was more irritated by this concept, that i should like any ads at all (even if one in 100 was something that did actually interest me) and that i didn't have the option to reject advertising while browsing facebook, period. when you delete an ad they ask you why, but they don't have a "hate advertising" option.

Vermont has no billboards, which i always thought was great. but at least where i live most of them are to do with the entertainment industry, so they don't bother me nearly as much as they have elsewhere. i used to sometimes use a subway station in San Francisco that had covered all of the stairs with a humongous ad for a heartburn medication, and having to walk down the damn thing made me so mad. what have we done to our world? the whole thing is for sale? next people will be putting plastic wraps on trees and painting the grass in parks with ads. there is already a woman (desperate for money for her child's education) who had her forehead tattooed with the name of a casino as an advertising gimmick. so she will be laughed at every time she goes anywhere for the rest of her life, so that a casino can have a walking advertisement. i don't keep a television and it's largely because i can't stand commercials being forced on me when i'm trying to watch something.

I usually decline to give out the information, but they are still willing to do business with me. If declining doesn't work, I make something up. Sometimes if the cashier says that the computer needs it in order to proceed, I ask the cashier to make something up.

I've done something like that. I've given the postal code to the CSIS headquarters and the RCMP headquarters instead of my own.

I don't get much junk mail. Junk mail I get is mostly Capital One. I just toss it out without opening it.

However I have kept getting Enfamil (sp) stuff and I wasn't even pregnant and it was as if they thought I was and I am not sure how it started. Then When I did get Pregnant, I started to get Huggies coupons on the mail and then a diaper sample that was a new design for Newborns and it said the baby was almost here as if they thought I was already pregnant and about to have it. I even got free baby formula in the mail from Enfamil the day I found out I lost the baby.

I still get that stuff sometimes but not much as I used to.