If you don’t get your possible customers consent, they will hate you.
No one wakes up in the morning to say to themselves “Boy I sure need some unsolicited marketing to me.” Yet every company thinks this is true.
Take for example what happened to me this morning. I had a company include me in their “newsletter/spam” that I had no desire to get. In fact, they think that I am another person which I know because I have googled my name and sometimes people contact me thinking I am the other person. So not only does it not apply to me, it doesn’t show that the company did any kind of vetting in their process. I will never buy from them even if I was in a position to.
As a rule, I don’t buy things that are advertised to me. If a company has enough money to advertise, they are doing just fine and don’t need my money. I only look for products that I find through research that will meet my needs. I rarely find a mass market object useful, and in fact I have found most products to be garbage. Not only they didn’t meet the basic requirement for the product, they often cost extra money and time to use.
Another example will help here. My grandmother had the slowest and worst Mercury ever made. That car had less power than a lawn mower. If you look up slow in the dictionary there isn’t a picture of a turtle, its the Mercury Zephyr. It did 0-60 in 60 seconds. It was ridiculous. Yet in 1980 even at that price point, that car lasted 15 years and still had some life left in it. I have bought cars that cost 5 times that amount and I felt lucky if they lasted 3 years of careful driving. Everything is designed to fall apart and that is not acceptable.
Therefore, when a company says that their latest product will fix the problem, that is often the reverse of the truth. When you don’t convince people with the merits of the product, you are forced to rely on puffery and lies and forcing people to look at your product. I don’t watch advertisements, and I don’t believe the hype.
Marketing without consent is anti-marketing. It makes people hate your product and never do business with your company.