The other day, my friend's step-father received a direct mail piece from his local hospital. It informed him that one of the unfortunate by-products of aging was erectile dysfunction (formerly known as "impotence"). This shouldn't be news to anyone who watches television or receives e-mail spam, but it was disturbing to my friend's mother since, as fate would have it, the step-father had been dead for several months.
Mack Collier, among others, has often stressed that every part of marketing is about customer experience. The above example illustrates how this even applies to something as bureaucratic and tedious as list management. It's bad enough that you may be irritating someone with unwanted junk mail, but what if you are actually reminding someone of a painful personal experience? When you are in the business of caring for people and easing their pain, like a hospital, shouldn't avoiding this scenario be of paramount importance?
Apparently, avoiding this misstep is easier said than done. A particularly egregious instance of this, in which a reservist in Britain's Royal Army Medical Corps, who had died in Basra, received a notice inviting him to re-enlist, highlighted how difficult it can be to get the names of dead people removed from various mailing lists. Just as an example, The Guardian reported that, in one case, a family had to "contact official bodies 44 times over 18 months to deal with a death." Needless to say, although several solutions have been proposed in Parliament, this problem has yet to be resolved across the Pond.
I'm not sure how much better things are here in the U.S. Two years ago the DMA set up a "do not call list" for dead people, though they did get some flack for charging money to have the names of the deceased removed from the list. I don't know if anyone is using the DMA list, and I must admit total ignorance when it comes to governmental remedies currently under consideration. In the absence of a statutory mandate, how do you make sure that your direct mail is not going to the dead (and inadvertently but understandably upsetting the living)?
Image courtesy of Methos04.
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