Anti-marketing groups – cause for the good or cause for concern?

The direct marketing discipline has long been the ‘whipping boy’ for the marketing industry. Excess waste, poor targeting and unsolicited are common accusations, despite it being one of the most targeted and measurable mediums. Anyone who saw the recent Panorama programme on ‘junk mail’ will note how easy it is for the mainstream media to demonise and under-value our profession.

Under this trend for ‘anti-marketing’, there are an increasing number of companies emerging – such as the Anti-Marketing Group – that supposedly help consumers eliminate unwanted sales calls and junk mail. But whose interests do such organisations really have at their heart – the consumers’, or their own?

I whole heartedly agree that consumers who don’t want to receive marketing communications should not be continuously contacted; it benefits neither the consumer nor the organisation spending money on customer acquisition. But I can’t help but feel there are far more effective and transparent ways of doing this than by using companies that imply their services protect the consumer.

My first concern is that unlike the TPS and MPS, which are free, legally binding and highly effective, these anti-marketing companies are charging consumers for their services. Indeed, I would argue that most consumers are unaware of the TPS and MPS, therefore these companies are unfairly capitalising on the public’s lack of knowledge when selling their services. These companies may counter my argument by saying what makes them different to the TPS is they “actively communicate with UK Marketing Companies on a regular basis, in order to prevent them from contacting member of our campaign.” But as one of the UK’s leading consumer data suppliers, we have never been approached to “actively communicate” with them. This is of course not to say that they aren’t in touch with other UK marketing companies, but as the self-styled ‘anti-marketing’ group, I question how receptive and productive these relationships really are when they effectively are the ‘enemy’ of marketing.

Secondly, it’s extremely ironic that some of these companies that are dedicated to ‘ending unwanted sale calls’ are using telemarketing to sell their services! We have first-hand experience of an anti-marketing company using this method and researching this further, it appears we are not alone. Their hard sell approach seems to fly in the face of what they supposedly stand for. The fact that the company in question just so happened to call one of our seeded records completely undermined the company’s legitimacy. It begs the question, when we categorically didn’t sell them the record, how did they come to receive our data? No explanation was given and no attempt was made to clear their name.

It’s important to note that it is not so much what these companies do that I’m against, but more the way that they do it. If it is to be done, then it must be done legitimately with full transparency and accountability, not just to make a quick buck.

John Pooley, Managing Director, The Data Partnership