I got a very thick envelope in the mail from the AAA (the auto club people). Inside was an elaborate direct mail letter explaining that “customers like me” enjoy their AAA membership and get a lot of value from it. The trouble is, nobody in my household has had a car for years. So much for their so-called customer research: it’s obvious the AAA is just spamming everyone in my zip code. I wonder how many other direct mail campaigns are blindly being sent to random lists of people instead of the targeted lists they were designed for — and how much this costs the marketers who were expecting better-than-average response rates.