Consumer Reports just got evil
I cancelled my consumer reports subscription a year ago. Now I want to unsubscribe from their “we want you back” spam and I get this totally bogus exit survey question:
I want to unsubscribe and am not comfortable receiving any more emails from ConsumerReports.org.
Below is the page I get after clicking “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the spam they send me.
I think technically you get unsubscribed by clicking on the link and I suspect that the “survey” button at the bottom tries to re-subscribe you since you’re “comfortable” with at least 1-5 emails from consumer reports on a monthly basis.
At the time of this writing, I’m not really sure what’s happening, what I do know is:
- The Consumer Reports survey felt super sketchy to me and definitely not in my best interests.
- I’ve gone from Consumer Reports Fan and paying subscriber to Consumer Reports Anti-Fan
- 5 years from now I’m not going to remember the details of why I don’t like Consumer Reports, all I will remember is how I last felt about the brand.
I hope whoever is responsible for this survey has a Google Alert set on “ConsumerReports.org” so they can pick up this blog post and think about making changes.
PS: If you manage an online brand, do consider creating a Google Alert on things you own, so news (however small at first) gets to you before your boss/engineers/competitors get it.
