Archive for May, 2007
Saturday Double Header
The other day I gave Time Warner/Comcast a hard time for an overly cute booklet they mailed to their Houston customers to explain the transition of the local cable franchise from one company to the other. I felt vindicated when the Houston Chronicle’s technology editor wrote about the Time Warner to Comcast transition on his blog and a couple [...]
Celebrity Fonts
A while back, John Whiteside did a post on Kate Moss’s font. (When Supermodels Have Serif.) It’s not a bad font, but, personally, I would have thought that Kate would have had something that looked more like her: coke-rail-thin, not so rounded and curvy. But John raises the specter of a new fad of celebrity fonts. [...]
Don’t Get Cute (Or, Context Counts)
Another note on customer communications: start with an honest assessment of what your customers really think about you.
The other day this appeared in my mailbox:
Some background: here in Houston, Comcast is taking over the local Time Warner cable franchise. We’ve seen some news items about it, but nothing has really changed yet - but apparently, [...]
Stop Talking to Your Customers
That’s right. Just stop. Shut up. At least, if you have nothing to say that they care about.
In the last week, I’ve gotten two phone calls on my cell phone that make me not want to be somebody’s customer.
The first came from the local Volkswagen dealer where I’ve taken my car for service. [...]
You Wanted Sell to Me? It’s Gonna Cost You
As marketers, one of the most exciting elements of all that data proliferating on the Internet is the potential to conduct highly targeted personalized marketing.
As consumers, this is one of the aspects of the Internet that most of us fear. Who wants someone out there knowing exactly how many minutes you spent trawling around Bluefly [...]
Department of Customer Prevention
Is it just me, or does this page simply scream ”Dear Customer, please do not bother us”?
This is what I encountered on the AT&T web site. I wanted to make some changes to my land line service.
While AT&T (or as they keep calling themselves, “the new AT&T!”) has an “online account manager” it’s one of [...]
Pretty Please With Splenda On It
Late last week, McNeil Nutritionals, makers of Splenda artificial sweetener, settled a lawsuit that Merisant, makers of Equal artificial sweetener, had mounted against them. Merisant had sued McNeil over Splenda’s tagline made from sugar so that it tastes like sugar, claiming that that tagline misled consumers into believing that Splenda is somehow more natural and healthier than [...]
Back to Basics
The marketing blogerati are abuzz over Delta Airlines apparently setting up a Twitter account (or, at the very least, someone who claims to be Delta Airlines doing it). (You can see it here.)
It’s interesting, but I’m a bit surprised at how many people are treating this like big news.
Is it interesting? You bet. Is [...]
Doubletalk Alert / Marketing Through Lawyers
HBO’s CTO has noticed that consumers don’t like digital rights management (DRM), because it prevents them from using content in legal ways that suit them. His solution: give it a new name!
That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an industry conference that DRM needs a name change. Zitter’s suggested [...]
To Market, to Market: How I Fell into Marketing
Even though one of my concentrations in business school was marketing, I didn’t start out to be a marketer.
How could I have?
When I entered business school, I had only the most rudimentary of notions about how business worked, let alone what marketing was. My work experience had basically been waitressing and scut-jobs. My jobs were so low-down [...]
