It seems almost every week a new junk mail study is published. Without exception these studies are commissioned by bulk mailers and they always have the same outcome: people feel negatively about junk mail, but they do read it. And, although they might realise it, they actually enjoy doing so.
The latest study was published this week by An Post, the Irish Post Office. An Post paid consultancy agency Amarach to conduct the research. What's interesting about this study is not the outcome, but what the head of Amarach told the Irish Independent about the research: I've never met anyone who likes direct mail, but then nobody likes advertising either.
In this rather frank statement lies the answer to the question why junk mail research is always so upbeat. What's being studied isn't how people really feel about junk mail - we already know the answer to that one. Instead, researchers only look at certain aspects of behavior in relation to junk mail. By doing so they can manipulate the outcome of the study.
To give an example, one of the questions respondents had to answer was how they prefer companies to communicate with them. There are two problems with a question like this. First of all, communication
suggests that there's interaction. That, of course, is hardly the case when it comes to unsolicited advertisements, and one would suspect that the reason why the researchers use the word communicate is because respondents are unlikely to associate it with sending junk mail.
More importantly, the respondents were obviously not given the option to say that they prefer not to receive 'unsolicited communications' at all. In other words, the question presumes that they want to receive junk mail. And so, unsurprisingly, one of the outcomes of An Post's study was that 70 per cent of people prefer companies to communicate with them by post rather than by internet or telephone
.
To be fair, it are not only bulk mailers that use spin. The Say not to phone books campaign, for example, has done some rather informal research suggesting that 80 per cent of Britons never uses a paper telephone directory and would support a central opt-out system for directories. They don't claim their research is any way scientific, but it does create a similar false impression.
Junk studies like this are completely useless and it is a shame that research like this is so abundant. It would be interesting to have some real research into attitudes towards junk mail, conducted by someone interested in facts rather than outcomes. Any students out there looking for an idea for a dissertation?