BJK&E

Another day, another feeding of the recycling bin with yet more direct mail, unsolicited magazines and other assorted marketing bumf. Waste. Waste. Waste.

I can live with relevant direct mail because I do occasionally receive something that is of genuine interest.  I can rationalise unsolicited magazines etc, because it’s probably the best way of experiencing new titles/features I may ‘need to know’  -  the rest get put into the boxes we send to good causes or whatever.

But I get really angry when sent promotional items packaged out of all proportion to the content. Today, like most of the media industry I reckon, I received an Easter Egg, in a box, in another box, in a padded envelope.  Thanks, but I don’t need an Easter Egg that badly.  And that reminds me of last year’s effort from an industry body that wanted to promote smart thinking by way of a tiny trinket or something of minimal volume distributed by way of a disproportionately large box.  smart thinking, I think not! 

For goodness sake, nowadays only a foolish enterprise would engage consumers with such needless waste.  So why does a community who should know better sometimes behave that way amongst itself?

If any relevant marketing bods are reading this, please, please, please think twice before actioning an overly packaged promo  -  if not for the sake of the planet, then for the sake of your brand.  I’m pretty certain I’m not alone in reacting negatively to such wastage.

And this is what I’m going to do about it: I’m going to start a separate blog on which I (and hopefully others) will post examples/images of questionably packaged items for people to shame (or not) by way of a vote.  Give me a couple of weeks to work on it, and watch this space for more details.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Random waffle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.