Neither Paper NOR Plastic, Thanks!
by Dawn St John
So the other day I received an unsolicited piece of junk mail. Apparently this is one of the dangers of starting your own business; everyone comes out of the woodwork and wants to sell you something. Look folks, I haven't even started making any money yet, what makes you think I want to give it to you? Your flagrant waste of paper further convinces me NOT to want to give you my money, in fact.
But what really catches me with this is the total lack of any kind of marketing research. I mean, really, people. Do you think a business named The Green anything is going to want to be targeted by extra pieces of paper? I mean, at least we'll recycle it where others might not, but that's utterly beside the point.
One of the mailings we received really hammered home how little attention they were paying to details such as who might be receiving their mailings. We received an ad from a company selling plastic bags. First of all, we're an online magazine - what do we need plastic bags for? The best I could do with them is line my trashcans... but I have old shopping bags for that purpose. I wouldn't buy bags in bulk to do this. Then there's the fact that we are a green magazine, and therefore not exactly the correct market for such items.
However, what REALLY catches me is the fact that they enclosed not just a sample plastic bag (which I neither need nor want, as mentioned above) but their business card was also inside of a small zip-locked baggie. What purpose does this serve, besides being wasteful?
It's so sad to me to see this kind of thing. Poor decisions, from which the whole planet has to suffer. There has to be a better way to find your target market.