Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Blow Up the Blow Out

If you are considering transacting business with a company in the midst of a self-proclaimed "BLOW OUT SALE!", run briskly toward the exits.

With the exception of actual liquidations, the aforementioned marketing tactic is knuckle-dragging lobotomized bravado at it's finest.

Retailers love the proverbial "blow out". They also love to tell you when items are "on sale". As I've told my lovely wife an infinite number of times- after she's detonated our plastic collection- she is prey and the merchant is an especially famished velociraptor. Oh, sure, they need to move some non-performing items but flowering it as an "on sale!" item while making sure you (the prey) see all the other lovely's like shooting fish in a fish market.

I drive by a New/"Pre-Owned" car dealership when I go to my gym. Not once has there been a day in which some "unbelievable, limited time offer" wasn't going on there. This hyperbole isn't relegated only to retail or car dealerships. I routinely see every conceivable item in every industry described as "incredible" or "astonishing". Not sure where you folks stand on this but I reserve use of these adjectives for things/events such as extraterrestrials playing kickball in my backyard or somebody whose will to live defies the most lethal agents of expiration.

THOSE things are astonishing; not download speeds that are twice as fast!!

Well..must be going; cases of Sam Adams Winter Ale have been marked down to $16 balloons at the continent-sized Wal-Mart Super Center. I mean, really, you can't beat that price.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Zero Out for Sanity

About 46 seconds into a recorded infomercial, I decided there must be a better way to renew my prescriptions over the telephone.

The poor pharmacist..he nervously laughed and said "corporate" is insisting that he (and other pharmacists) are also required to attempt to upsell while engaged with the customer standing in their physical proximity.

This is where we currently stand in the world of BigCo marketing; and this practice started WELL before the economy hit the skids back in the year 1388.

I won't tell you the name of the mega-pharmacy chain that just pinned me to the wall (though it does rhyme with Height Laid) though I find it astonishing that a company with this type of marketing muscle has been reduced to this type of horsebleep. After re-reading the sentence I just plucked, why should this surprise me? The aforementioned one-to-one "marketing" example is EVERYWHERE. People who are compensated on a par with heart surgeons to "increase growth"...this is the best they got.

If the U.S. is no longer in the business of actually making anything anymore we better be Rock Stars at the other stuff, e.g., any type of services.

So how's "Customer Service" treating you these days/daze?

I repeat: If the US is no longer going to manufacture stuff, we need to be nothing short of spectacular in any type of commerce that would be categorized under the heading SERVICES.

Now pardon me while I prepare for my two services related visits later today with: A.) My primary care physician, his staff and Managed Care and B.) The Registry of Motor Vehicles. I'm not expected to survive.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Keggar Wisdom

I was on the phone today with someone who described himself as “an executive recruiter”. Being able to often tell a person’s approximate age by how they present and speak on the phone, my guess is this young man was about 8 months removed from his last college keg party. He assured me on the phone “that his company KNOWS sales”.

That was really interesting to me because I don’t have the faintest idea what that means.

I’m not going to blame his lack of experience for making such a preposterous claim. I hear people and companies saying such things all the time.

If someone wants or needs what it is you’re “selling”, they will do so independent of anything you do or say. The sole exception is they believe you to be an utter nincompoop and request someone else to handle the transaction and subsequent account management.

Anything beyond that I will defer to the “keggar kid” whose company know sales.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Follow the Perfume Coyote onTwitbook

Bill Gates hired a guy from the perfume business to head up his marketing back when his fledgling company was called "Micro-Soft" and company-wide meetings could be held in four corner tables of an also fledgling company called Starbucks.

When you know him as well as I do, you called him "Billy" and ol' Billy Gates isn't worth more than the Gross Domestic Product of Portugal because he was rejected as an extra from the film "Sling Blade". He picked a guy from the perfume business because this person understood the psychology of why people want to buy things. And that is the primary reason a company succeeds.

Now for something essentially unrelated:

What was called "New Media" only a couple of years ago is now largely being called Social Media. Similar to the blind rush of creating a business website 15 years ago, companies have thrown money and people at Social Media marketing without the slightest idea on what to expect from it or why anyone with more than 11 brain cells would have any interest it.

An auto parts retailer I drove by today suggested I should "Like" them on Facebook. Really? A furniture company tells me it's a good idea to "follow them on Twitter". I would rather follow The Bugs Bunny Coyote off a cliff. Can someone explain to me why I want to read the inane marketing drivel from a chain sandwich shop or a shipping company in the little free time I have?

The Land of Opportunity also happens to be The Land of Are We Really That Stupid?

To paraphrase the brilliant,deceased Mark Twain, "you can keep your yapper closed and let a few people think you're not with the program or you can open your piehole and remove all doubt".

Mark Twain insists you DON'T follow him on TwainTwit.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Funky Cold

Funks- business or otherwise-are inevitable. You're human and the world is a sea of uncertainty..that reality is not in dispute. And as certain as this blue pebble spinning around the Sun, the harder you try to get out of it, the worse it gets.

"When you find yourself going through hell...keep going" was once uttered by a great man who's problems were a helluva lot more intense that virtually anyone alive. Stop trying to change everything and carry on.

Consistent with most of these ebbs is the feeling that you are not enough. That sentiment will be echoed by every touch you have with any form of media. You can be more or you're not enough is a half a trillion dollar industry.


The world as it is vs. the world as it should be. You tear yourself up over this one. The moment you can get over this silent intellectualized battle is the moment you'll notice the ball starting to bounce your way-and when it doesn't- you'll attach no real ong-term importantce to bouncing balls anyway.

You got dealt a helluva good hand.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Both Atlas-and I- Shrugged.

It all evens out; at least that's what I tell myself.

I read all 776,981,442 pages of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged about two years ago for the first time. It got me so fired up that I wanted to land my Taggart Transcontinental helicopter in Harvard Square, find the first Academic Socialist I could find (.09 seconds) and furiously debate them. The problem is-then and still sometimes now-I have a tendency to read other people's ideas and take them as my own.

Not smart.

It's hard sometimes to reconcile a system that pays gazillions to schmucks who do nothing more than move blocks of highly dubious financially engineered capital around while an exceptionally skilled critical care nurse might just get by. Spare me the bullshit that defends or rationalizes the above. I've heard it in 90 different flavors.

The problem, however, with any form of collectivism is it is managed by humans and we are prodigiously flawed. Any form of it has never worked and it never will. All collectivism has ever accomplished is the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of millions.

"..The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.." might be the most brilliant thing ever said about economic systems. Google its author. He said many smart things.

I won the lottery at birth but I don't have the stomach for this world sometimes.