Good Intentions Gone Wrong
During my recent birthday, I had the pleasure of receiving celebratory greetings from many of the most important people in my life.
My family.
My friends, near and far.
My dentist.
Not just my dentist, actually. The massive medical practice where my primary care doctor works and the hospital they are affiliated with. My insurance broker. A different insurance broker I spoke to a long time ago but never hired. The place where I leased a car seven years ago. The place where I get acupuncture now. My old gym. (Yes, I took notes.)
It’s just weird.
I get that, thanks to modern technology, all these people have (or can find) my date of birth and can generate these birthday emails automatically with no extra cost or effort. I also get that the messages are part of a broader, somewhat cynical marketing plan, a good excuse to make contact with customers, generate goodwill, and, theoretically at least, incentivize spending. According to the preview of a 2013 Ad Week article I couldn’t read without a subscription and wasn’t willing to pay for, at one time studies showed that nothing lets a customer know how much you care quite like a personalized birthday greeting. Maybe that was true in the halcyon days when the internet was relatively new and having businesses single you out felt special, especially when the birthday greeting was linked to some kind of targeted reward. But it’s not like my dentist is offering a discount on my next teeth cleaning. Or my broker is reducing the premium for my homeowners’ insurance. Not even Dunkin’ Donuts offers free birthday coffee anymore. And while a financial incentive isn’t the only way to build customer loyalty, have you ever met anyone who went to or recommended a service provider because they sent a really good birthday email?
I’m sure someone in the world of Big Data has studied this question and come up with an answer. But I’m not going to even try to find it. Because I don’t really care if some statistically relevant number of people is influenced by receiving a birthday greeting from their local urgent care center, as I did TWICE during the two weeks before my own birthday. I’ll say it again:
It’s just weird.
It’s weird my insurance company sends more effusive messages than some of my dearest friends: “Today is special because of you.” (Yep, the insurance company writes me too, not just the two brokers.) Perhaps it’s not as weird as the emails and texts that have started to arrive after a random internet search of, say, napkins: “We saw you checking out these bespoke napkins last night when you couldn’t sleep, and they popped up on your Instagram feed.” But I still find the birthday emails quite odd. To me, these manipulative greetings are a disturbing reminder of how much of our personal information is available to be used—and abused—by third parties. More than a decade after that Ad Week article, after we’ve all endured innumerable data breaches and phishing scams and malware attacks, a birthday email from a makeup store I visited once doesn’t feel like a kind remembrance. It feels like being stalked.
Perhaps we’re stuck in this world where everyone can know everything about you. But can’t we at least act like that’s not true? When you call a business for the first time, do they have to greet you by name before you’ve said a word? Even if caller ID obviously reveals my identity, I’d like to at least pretend to give that information to the company myself.
Although it may be a pipe dream, I’d also like to receive fewer of these insincere birthday greetings on my special day. In the meantime, I guess all I can do is be grateful that at least there wasn’t one from AARP. Or my gynecologist.