Opt-Out Effect, The: Marketing Strategies that Empower Consumers and Win Customer-Driven Brand Loyalty

2. The Opt-Out Effect

In this chapter I focus on brand marketers and how they are responding in the age of the customer. My research shows that a large number of marketers remain motivated by a remarkably seductive and broad-based but mistaken perception that digital marketing is essentially free—just as they have done for so many years with their email practices. On the surface this makes perfect sense when you consider the marginal cost to a marketer of sending another email or presenting another pop-up ad to a customer—virtually zero. It is this engrained perception that permeates much of marketing, that as long as it’s cheap enough, more must be better.

Consequently, marketers blast away at buyers with indiscriminate marketing programs—high-frequency ...