How much junk does advertising mail generate? Not as much as you think.
DM News and Pitney Bowes recently conducted a survey of survey on the attitudes of consumers regarding direct mail and the environment. The results show that consumers greatly overestimate the negative environmental impact of direct mail.
Here’s an excerpt of the story on the results:
"Of the 1,000 Americans age 18 and over who took part in the survey (divided equally between men and women), 48% guessed that advertising mail from US households counted for more than half of the country’s municipal waste. Another 36% said it counted for slightly more than a third of that waste, and 12% of respondents guessed 9%.
"In reality, advertising mail is responsible for just 2% of all municipal waste in the US, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, an answer chosen by only 2% of the respondents.
"Respondents also vastly overestimated the amount of carbon dioxide released in the delivery of advertising mail. When asked to rank seven activities by their carbon dioxide output, respondents chose “Delivering an average of 10 to 11 pieces of transactional mail to your house for a year” as the third-most damaging activity, behind “driving a 2007 automatic, compact, four-door sedan 1,000 miles in one month” and “one year’s electricity usage for a 1992 top-freezer refrigerator with 19 to 21 cubic feet of space.”
"In truth, not only does delivering that quantity of mail produce the least carbon dioxide of all seven activities listed, it produced hardly a fraction of those believed by respondents to be the least harmful"
This evidence points very clearly to the challenge we have as an industry. Consumers attitudes towards direct marketing and direct mail are extremely negative. But facts like these show those attitudes are unfounded. Why is this? How can we change it?