Spam Revisited Brief Literature Review of Ethics and Marketing Communication

Spam Revisited ABSTRACT Even though unsolicited commercial e-mail or Spam continues to be a major problem, very little academic research has focused on it. Notable exceptions include The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the Spam problem and a critical analysis of the solutions. We begin with a definition of Spam. This is followed by an analysis of the pernicious impact of Spam on the major stakeholder groups-consumers, Internet Service Providers, legitimate advertisers, e-commerce firms and employers. Since there is no " clean " solution to limiting the volume or nature of Spam, a variety of responses to Spam exist. These can be placed into four categories-laissez faire arguments, business-initiated solutions, third-party oversight, consumer education and legislative solutions. For the remainder of the paper, we focus upon one business-initiated solution-permission marketing (Godin 1999). Permission marketing envisages a world where consumers control the promotional messages targeted at them. Consumers provide a firm information about their interests and product preferences. The firm then sends the consumer promotional messages based on this information. We argue that, even though this idea has merit, there has been an inconsistent application of this idea. To support this, we discuss six variants of the original concept of Spam that purport to use permission marketing. Based on this discussion, we end by identifying six key elements that must be a part of every permission marketing campaign if it has to be clearly distinguished from Spam. 1. INTRODUCTION Firms are increasingly using e-mail as a marketing tool to acquire customers, make them aware of new products and build deep customer relationships. The average number of commercial e-mail messages that US online consumers receive annually A significant proportion of these commercial e-mails are likely to be unsolicited or Spam 2 (Cranor and LaMacchia 1998). Most Internet users are affected by Spam-over 90% of users receive Spam at least once a week, almost 50% get Spammed 6 or more times per week(Gartner Group, June 1999). America Online, the leading Internet Service Provider(ISP) testified in court that up to 30% of the e-mail it processes is Spam(Alexander 1998). In some weeks, this proportion can be as high as 50% of all messages(Patch and Smalley 1998). Consumers perceive Spam negatively. One in three online consumers report that they do not read e-mail from senders they don't know and 16% say that they immediately delete messages that are not …