Shame on you Virgin – using a hokey-cokey marketing trick to spam you
Richard Branson’s Virgin brand is supposed to pride itself on treating its customers right.
Whether it lives up to it in practice is open to question, but I was shocked to see what I suspect is a deliberate attempt by the Virgin Atlantic credit card to befuddle consumers into signing up to its marketing, effectively a spammer’s charter.
I’ve written before about firms attempting to do this, see Is the Post Office playing fair over its marketing list? This is all about what I’m calling a hokey-cokey trick, deliberately changing whether the click means to opt in or to opt out.
The following is a print screen from its credit card application form…
As you can see, you have to change whether you need to opt in, opt out (or shake it all about) depending on your preferences for each line. While they’re within the letter of the law by ensuring it’s written clearly, this is a trick to catch out people filling the forms in quickly. I suspect they’ve done A-B testing and discovered this has a higher sign-up rate.
All very well, but giving people communications due to confusing forms, when they don’t want it, is spam.
Do you agree?
