Sandra Bernhadts' rumoured message to Madonna is being echoed by more and more British consumers - according to Marketing Magazine over 3 million people have signed up to say no to marketing phone calls in the last year!
The current number of households opted out stands at 7.4 million. In a DMA survey just 2% of people said they liked this medium - yet some advertisers persist in using it.
Why? Because they're using inadequate measurements for ROI - they're only counting the successful calls and using that to justify the excercise. Yet if they were to measure the negative effect on the brand - the people who hate the phone calls and vow never to buy from that brand again - they'd see it is a very bad use of marketing spend.
In the US over 62 million people have signed up for the Do Not Call programme - in little more than a year since it started. There are also quite a few websites offering advice on how to deal with marketing calls - our favourite is to tell the caller that you're really interested in whatever it is they're touting - than ask them to hold on. You then go back to what you were doing knowing that the caller won't hang up for ages - screwing up the economics of the call centre - and hang up later.
People don't want to be called and smart marketers respect what people want.
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