Once upon a time, businesses actually tried to find customers by doing market research, and actively tried to retain them through quality service and attentiveness. I now find it rare to encounter such a company, with most businesses utilizing the physical equivalents of spam to create business. We focus a lot of attention to preventing it in our inboxes, but think little about how the pervasive and accepted the practice is in general.The core principles are incredibly simple:

1. Invest as little as possible in both the process of locating customers.
2. Use the money saved to blanket as large a population as possible with ads and other marketing materials.
3. Treat customer relationships as commodities, from whose sale a profit can also be made.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of practices that these business engage in, besides the obvious spam email messages:

1. Home renovation and alarm companies staking out the registry of deeds to look for new home sales so that they can begin mailing materials about their services to newly purchased homes.
2. Business products companies such as credit card processors, branded merchandise sellers, and invoice printers watching for new business registrations to being frantically mailing their marketing materials.
3. From my own life recently - a purchase of diapers online leading to the sudden receipt of a blizzard of mailers for formula, picture packages, and other materials for new parents. Unfortunately for them (and for me) my kid is 2.

In each case, the company is relying on the low cost to obtain information and some likely statistical correlation between the activity and their business, rather than having any clear sense of who a likely customer would be. For instance, I just opened this business a few months ago and received a steady stream of materials for credit card processing companies, despite the fact that I am not a retail business (which is clear from my business registration info), have no need to process credit cards, and even if I did I would just use Paypal, so they were just throwing away money.

We are seeing the result in our mailboxes and transactions every day: junk mail from companies that either captured a public event such as a home purchase or bought a name from a partner institution that has little or nothing to do with anything we'd ever be interested in. Unfortunately, consumers are very much to blame for this result, in two ways. First, it must be effective, otherwise companies would not continue through money at bulk mailings. Second, we are too willing to part with personal information for littler or no cost. Think of how you casually give out your zip code or email address to a retailer when asked. We feel significant social pressure to do so, despite the fact that it is totally unnecessary.

I believe that if consumers wise up to spam marketing practices in all forms, it will no longer be cost effective to do it, which would be great in many ways. Here are a few rules I try to follow:

1. Never give out any personal information for free. If they want my zip code to complete the purchase, I'll need at least a 10% discount.
2. Never purchase anything from a company from whom you have received an unsolicited mailing. Not only does it encourage the practice, but chances are, they are going to continue to treat you as a statistic, giving you as much attention as they did in finding you in the first place.
3. Whenever you buy anything that requires you to hand over personal information, make sure to indicate that you would not like your name or personal information sold or turned over to any other party. In most cases, they have to abide by your request, although sometimes they will simply refuse to complete the transaction.
4. Terminate business with any company that sells your name. Sometimes, it's impossible to tell who was the source of a sudden torrent of junk, but other times it's all too obvious.

Of course, occasionally it can work in your favor: after the diaper company sold our name to a couple dozen other retailers, we eventually were given a free subscription to "parenting" magazine by one of them. My wife, who is ultra diligent about calling and cancelling unwanted subscriptions and junk mail flows, immediately called the publisher to cancel this one. A few weeks later we got a check for the unused portion, for a little over $15. I tried to figure out exactly where that $15 ultimately originated from, but it just made my head hurt.