1st
Well, it ain’t rocket science to figure out even without an official study, but as it turns out, people can detect when someone is pretending to be friendly and “personalizing” marketing messages or pitches. Some PR person is inevitably going to write something about this, linking it back into best practices, etc. Lemme help everyone out. You know, like. Don’t. Suck.
Hehehe. This is a real/serious issue, though, and especially for PR people who might need some extra ammo to help convince a client to become more authentic and transparent vis-a-vis their marketing program, the study might actually be really useful in fighting that good fight.
A big takeaway from this too is that as the Web generally moves towards personalization (think Aggregate Knowledge and similar technologies, as one example) the humans behind those technologies need to be careful about over-using or mis-using personalization as a way of dealing with information overload.