Marketing Guru Scott Hornstein Sounds Off: The Cognitive Dissonance of Spam

A cognition is an element of knowledge or belief.

Cognitive dissonance, as proposed by the psychologist Leon Festinger—and loosely defined by me—is when your knowledge, as evidenced by your day-to-day life, is directly at odds with what is otherwise reported to be reality. This dissonance caused by the contradicting cognitions initially stuns, then pushes us to process the data some more.

I’m a-swamp with cognitive dissonance. Specifically, I just don’t understand why spam still exists. I suspect greed.

On January 28, 2004, Bill Gates predicted that spam would be a “thing of the past” within two years—I hope you weren’t holding your breath. Judging from my inbox, it’s very much alive.

JupiterResearch reports recently predicted that “the volume of spam messages per customer will steadily decrease by 13 percent a year from 2005 to 2010.”

Is this your experience? It’s not mine.

Let’s face it, there’s only two entities that could squash spam, I mean really step on it hard, once and for all: The federal government and the computer/software giants. Personally, I take any federal intervention or oversight as unabashed bad news for industry.

So that leaves those with the clout to deliver the k-o, like the IBMs, Microsoft’s, Intel’s, Dell’s, etc.

In processing my cognitive dissonance, I think the reason that Bill Gates’ prediction hasn’t come true is that the industry giants have simply determined that there isn’t enough money to be made in eliminating spam. Would it deliver lots of happy loyal customers? Yes. Immediate profits? Probably not.

What do you think?

Comments

[JJ Woods]

Here's a fun solution to the cognitive disonance problem of spam, that is, to make is a very simple issue.

All Spammers sign up for a Spam Sorter Search Engine.
You get one, yes ONE spam email per month. Within the email is a link to "I want it bigger.com" or "I want to be smaller.com."

Each page has opt in checklists that the search engines then take and make a list of matches for the opt inner.: ) The spammers must pay to be available in the Search Engine. Sure a few bucks a month - for how many spammers.

Everyone who wants whatever the heck these people are trying to push can have it with out inundating the rest of us.

The search engine sites can then have an IPO and the owners can get rich beyond reason. Hmmm, I think I just wrote a business plan.

[NoahF]

Out of the last 100 emails I've recieved I have had over 20 spam emails. I'm sick of it. It's simply not right to have an inbox cluttered with "would you like your ____ enlarged?". When there is profit to be made by these large software giants, spam will decrease. When it's not as easy to send out 1,000,000 emails to random people who's addresses you bought for a few hundred dollars, then change will happen. When email postage becomes the norm for businesses to get an email to customers that don't recognize the email address, which is something that AOL is currently working on for business email accounts, then change will happen. If companies would listen to what Scott Hornstein suggests in his Opt-In Marketing book (highly recommended)regarding how to treat the customer properly, then change will happen. Until then it's as easy as Joe1234@aol.com. Happy emailing!

[raronauer]

When it comes to Spam, I must have been left off the e-mail list.

I rarely get any. My e-mail address is available online, but I never get more than a message day. And when I do receive unwanted stock tips or pharmaceutical offers, my e-mail provider almost always routes it to my junk box. Even spam in my inbox isn’t a big inconvenience for me: I simply delete it.
Is there an inequality of Spam distribution? I’ve only read about Spam problems, but a friend or colleague has never complained of one to me.

E-mail providers should continue to their efforts to sort out spam. But maybe their reluctance to eradicate Spam entirely is less about the bottom than about the limits of the problem.