Daily Archives: September 17, 2010

Broken Marketing

In terms of marketing, spamming via regular mail is right there on top of my hatelist along with door-to-door religious marketing and telemarketing. So no matter how beautifully personalized the message is (Dear N.N. and so on), stuffing trash through the mail slot in my door most likely will not make me buy whatever you’re trying to sell. It will, however, help the paper recycling business. In addition, the means through which the message arrived was not its only flaw.

The whole offer was meticulously composed in a way that made it impossible to clearly decipher how much the offering was actually going to cost. No, I don’t give a shit that it’s “the rest of the year for the price of 2 months” if you will not tell me how much exactly is two months in fucking real currency. Due to some brain lapse I was actually interested in seeing if ordering the newspaper in question would have any value for me, so I wasted 5 minutes of my life turning the A3-sized offer sheet around trying to find the only information I was interested in in the first place.  Alas, all the marketing department had had the wisdom to print was praise for all the useless “benefits” a potential customer would be getting. Oh, that, and of course how much money I would be saving. Apparently I don’t need to spend a dime. This is full of win.

Naturally, the attached order form had the actual price written on it but even there the box-checking system was confusingly stupid. I’m too lazy to scan the form so you’ll just have to take my word for that. The potential customer is always right.

-L