Do Young People Prefer Print Marketing?
( By Doc | October 15, 2010, 7:15am PDT - ZD Net)

It may seem counter intuitive, but Doc was not completely surprised to see that in the results of a new study on direct marketing, for certain types of products and services, young people in the 18-34 year old bracket prefer receiving messages by print.

The study, titled “Finding the Right Channel Combination: What Drives Channel Choice?” was conducted by ICOM, a division of Epsilon Targeting, and surveyed over 2500 U.S. and 2200 Canadian households and found that, when asked their preference, consumers prefer direct mail over online media for many types of marketing communications.

By the numbers, here are some of the key results from ICOM’s 2010 study of North American consumers’ marketing communication channel preferences:

For household and health products, the preference among 18-34 year-old Americans for receiving marketing information from offline sources led by mail and newspapers is 2 to 3 times greater than online sources such as social media.

Examples of consumer preferences for offline versus online are:

Travel was the exception, where 18-34 year-old Americans preferred online to offline information by a 42% to 35% margin, however, insurance and financial services followed the overall trend, with the 18-34 age group preferring offline sources 43% to 21% and 44% to 19%, respectively.

The survey also indicated that consumers of all ages are finding postal mail more trustworthy these days. Information is more private if sent through the mail versus e-mail or online, according to 36% of US respondents and 38% of Canadian respondents.

So what did Doc learn from this report? That for certain types of information that is deemed either more personal or important, even young people have more trust in print. Very interesting.