Here’s the deal: my recycle bin now contains somewhere between 5 and 10 pieces of unopened direct mail offers from Qwest, addressed to my home address and home-based office (2 different accounts from their POV). All of these pieces have been delivered within the past 2 days.

All tout some variation of their so-called high-speed Internet service. Or service bundles based on high-speed Internet bandwidth. Meanwhile, Qwest can only deliver 256K of bandwidth to this location — a situation that has not changed in >10 years.

Living in the Northwest as I do, where the swaths of clear-cut forest are painfully visible, receiving so many useless direct mail pieces is offensive. It makes me sick to think of how many trees are being cut down to produce paper that will be wasted so fruitlessly.

I wish someone at Qwest (or their agency) would figure out how to link their service capabilities database (NOC operations side of the house) with their prospecting databases. This may be politically difficult, given internal silos, but surely it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to develop this data mining and targeting strategy. They could fund it by the improvement in their conversion ratios, by the savings generated from not sending offers that are 100% guaranteed to fail.

If they had a more intelligent data mining and targeting strategy, they would know that this address (and others like mine) should be eliminated from their prospect database until they can radically increase bandwidth delivery to these locations.

Right now, based on actual bandwidth to my office, they are so far from being competitive that it’s laughable — and it tarnishes their brand when they make claims that they cannot deliver on. As a result of these poor marketing practices, whenever I see a direct mail offer from Qwest, my first reaction is “stupid” and “wasteful” — “not sustainable.” They’ve trained me not to open their mailings. Do they even care about their brand?

They send me dozens of useless direct mail pieces every month, not to mention many telemarketing calls that I no longer answer. (I’ve probably told their CSRs a dozen times that until they can deliver >10–15 MB to this location, they have zero chance of persuading me to switch carriers.) What a waste of resources.

Will someone please help this marketing department evolve from the Stone Age?