the missing verizon bill

It surprises me when companies decide to design misleading communications with their customers. I thought of this when I was looking through my “snail” mail and realized that I had discarded my Verizon bill last month.

This is a classic issue of volume versus time when it comes to mass-marketing mailings, and in an attempt to limit my attention to only the relevant items in my mailbox, I had clearly mislabeled the Verizon bill. I may have trashed it or simply filed in into my pile of offer mail (which I so rarely file through).

One of the psychology principles Don Norman touches upon in The Design of Everyday Things is that people remember things only enough to make basic distinctions between objects. In the example used in the book, he shows that most people cannot remember all the features of an American penny without reference, but that they of course know a penny when they see one. It’s that we remember enough about coins to distingush them apart from other coins more than we remember to identify them specifically by their features and details—which is why the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin was such a disaster, because while the features were distinct from the quarter, its size and color were almost identical.

When we look at a pile of change in our hand to count it, we look for the differences: we see bronze-colored coins, tiny coins, small & fat coins, and large coins. I didn’t say which ones were which…but you knew. The new one-dollar coin is now slightly larger than a quarter and gold-colored for this very reason.

So when I’m looking through a big fat pile of mail, I begin to mentally sort in the same way. Now, there’s a couple of ways direct marketers seem to have addressed their mailings. The honest way is to place the pitch on the outside of the envelope. Visibility is high, and it’s easy tell what it is before opening. The indifferent way is to not put anything on the outside. Without knowing what’s inside, it forces the recipient to open it up to at least get an idea. The dishonest way is to scream “IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED” all over the envelope when the only thing inside is an offer for a timeshare in Florida.

The last important piece is what seems to be an emerging standard: if a letter is a bill, it generally says so. Often the phrasing is along the lines of “Important Billing Information Enclosed”, just enough for you to connect the time you received it with the sender to pass that filter.

Now you can see the problem:

See, we do this with mail all the time, and we’re not usually aware of it. The criteria changes pretty rapidly as we adapt to existing marketing techniques. And if you were to create a matrix of all of the elements individually, it would be quite mammoth: use of photography, thickness of envelope, color, postmark. Humans are exceptionally good at processing lots of visual data at once, and combined with cultural constraints it results in our ability to casually look at something and go “well, that’s junk.”

Verizon broke a golden rule by adding a pitch onto something that was bill, and it resulted with me assuming it was yet another plea to buy DSL service from them. Unknowingly? They may have just wanted yet another place to push their slogan. Knowingly? If I hesitate on the bill, I get late charges, and now to avoid future late charges I will probably open every one of their mails the moment I recieve them.

Either way, it ticks me off.