Consumer Participation in Mailing Lists: A Field Experiment

Increasingly, companies are acquiring customer names and personal information for database marketing purposes. Because lists of customer names often are sold and rented without customer knowledge, legislation has been proposed to curtail the ability of marketers to sell personal information without customer consent. In reaction, the direct marketing community has responded with aggressive self-regulation, strongly recommending negative option permission formats and carefully worded disclosure statements. The author examines the assumptions underlying the direct marketing community's self-regulation efforts. Using afield experiment, the author measures consumers’ willingness to provide marketers with personal information and permission to rent this information based on varying permission formats, type of information requested, and level of disclosure. The results of the field experiment support the direct marketing community's assumptions about how question format affects consumers’ willingness to allow their personal information to be transferred to a third party. However, the results do not support the common assumptions that using negative option formats and not asking consumers for sensitive information improves consumers’ willingness to join mailing lists.