Knott's Berry Farm -- For shame!

Okay, this is not a rant on junk food.  I think when people eat Cheez-wiz, they aren’t misguided enough to assume they’re eating healthful real cheese.  When people eat a double fudge brownie, I doubt they’re confusing this with an apple.  And when people eat Cap’n Crunch cereal, there’s no way they’d assume they’re consuming real fruit.  Oh, um, wait a minute, someone did?  Er, well, anyway, you get my point :-D

But seriously… sometimes there’s an absolute nasty & unhealthy food paired with such obnoxiously, blatantly misleading marketing that I can’t help calling a spade a hyrogenated [sic] artificially flavored spade.

First, the marketing that, by all means, should condemn some marketer to eternal dietary hell:

“In 1920, Walter and Cordelia Knott began selling fresh produce, berries, and preserves from a roadside berry stand in Buena Park, California.  Their family business earned a place in history in 1932 when Walter Knott cultivated a lucious new fruit, the boysenberry.  The farm that started it all has also become a family amusement park that delights millions. 

The Knott family is pleased to extend their tradition of quality to include premium shortbread cookies.  Richly flavorful, these classic favorites are prepared using popular Knott’s Berry farm fruit fillings.”

Let’s dissect this, shall we?

> In 1920, Walter and Cordelia Knott began selling fresh produce, berries, and preserves from a roadside berry stand in Buena Park, California.
...and boy, would they be horrified to see how their heirs have sold them out!

> ...when Walter Knott cultivated a lucious new fruit, the boysenberry.
...which you’ll find all of likely one-tenth of a gram of in this plasticfood monstrosity.

> ... premium shortbread cookies
... where “premium” means “premium profits for us, utter crap for you.”

> ... Richly flavorful
... from lots of high fructose corn syrup

> ... these classic favorites
... if you call a frankenstein concoction of chemicals “classic.”  Maybe a classic case of deceit.

> ... using popular Knott’s Berry farm fruit fillings.
... oh, wait, we meant popular dental fillings!

*  *  *

But enough pre-commentary.  Without further ado, let’s take a look at these charming ingredients, shall we? (and out of kindness, I’ll substitute normal text for the ALL CAPS printed)

Enriched wheat flour [artificial vitamin enrichment crap omitted], margarine (liquid soybean oil, partially hyrogenated [sic] soybean oil, water, salt, whey, lecithin, mono and di-glycerides, sodium benzoate a preservative, artificial butter flavor, beta carotene and vitamin A palmitate), raspberry topping (high fructose corn syrup, red raspberries, apple powder, fruit pectin, citric acid, natural and artificial flavors, calcium chloride, FD&C red #40 and blue #1), sugar, eggs, baking soda, natural and artificial flavor, baking ammonium, and salt.

Mmmm… delicious, no?  Just like Grandma would have made it… if she had access to a chemistry lab *and* passionately hated your guts.

Oh, and lookie here, (unsurprisingly) almost no redeeming nutritive qualities at all… little fiber or protein, and a charming 3 grams of trans-fat (I didn’t even know there were many packaged goods that still had this stuff in ‘em nowadays!)

For comparison, let’s take a look at a typical recipe for berry shortbread cookies:

1 cup butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup seedless raspberry jam
GLAZE:
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons water
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

(from AllRecipes.com)

Notice a difference?  Yes!  You recognize and can likely pronounce the ingredients, and there are fewer than a dozen of them.

*  *  *

Look, as I said, I don’t have a problem with companies making utter junkfood.  I do, however, have a problem about them so blatantly misrepresenting their product.  Even an intelligent acquaintance of mine said (without any prompting from me) that she used to eat these cookies every day for lunch, figuring that they were relatively harmless.  Oops!

P.S.—Might think twice before buying any of Knott’s Berry Farm jams or other products, eh?

BLADAM is a best-of-breed, scalable end-to-end Web 2.0 solution

That was a pretty obnoxious title, wasn't it? String a few more sentences like that together, add a bogus (completely fabricated) self-congratulatory CEO quote or two and voila, you have a typical press release. Including something like this:

"We're proud that BLADAM is offered in a cutting-edge delivery system that reaches a diverse mix of savvy consumers" notes BLADAM CEO Adam Lasnik "And we're confident that our unique, patent-pending ContentTextual(tm) presentation will provide a rapidly growing platform for future advantageous growth in this medium. Oh, and did I mention that BLADAM is Web 2.0? Web 2.0! We're hip! We're like Zimeebratr, but better!"

* * *

You'd think that companies would be more clueful today, but alas, even some overall clued-in companies I've worked for (and generally admired) spew e-xcrement like this.

I was reminded about how press releases should look when I read this clued-in comment from an entry on Jeremy Zawodny's blog:

There's somewhat of a convention and a pack instinct to press releases. Shame someone doesn't learn from the Jesus and Mary Chain approach approach to concerts - play for 10 minutes and then walk off.


It would be refreshing to see company dare to do one paragraph press releases. Couldn't some PR company introduce "2.0" PR and make its name by completely revolutionizing press releases.


Perhaps the new rules could be:
- no declaration of "[company], the global leader in ..." or "a leading ... company"
- absolutely no buzzwords
- no warm, fluffy exec quotes
- say exactly what it means
- be concise in the extreme
- if necessary provide a supplementary FAQ for each release
- if you've got nothing to say don't feel the need to fill the silence (mind you if your company hasn't run a release in 3 months it's a clear sign your revenues are going south)


This new generation PR company should promote itself via a press release analyzer - drop your press release into a textbox on a form - the analyzer scores it for buzzwords, meaningless fluff and makes recommendations. A top/bottom 10 list of major Internet companies scores is maintained.

This commenter's suggestions were triggered by Jeremy's article, which in itself was in response to the thoughtful rant by Tom Forenski. I'm not sure I agree with Tom's proposed remedies, but I do believe that something must be done. After all, when even casual bloggers like me are getting sent cringeworthy press releases (seriously!), you know there's something wrong with the world.

* * *

So here, let me take a stab at a press release for a new product:

"Hi Walt,

Just wanted to give you a heads-up on our newest product. I know you're swamped, so I'm just sending you this plain-text e-mail with the basics, and I welcome you to click through for more details or call/e-mail/IM me anytime with questions! Thanks so much for your time, and have a good week.

Regards,
Adam
[contact info]

INDUSTRY SPACE:
PRODUCT (and version #):
WHAT IT DOES: [short bulleted list]
WHY IT MATTERS: [<30 words]:"

* * *

On a related note, can you imagine the impact if press releases were sent on handwritten (ahem, normal-sized) postcards? No, really, I'm serious. This would accomplish the following:
- It'd demonstrate that the release wasn't blasted to 47183782835 journalists.
- This would force writers to be concise. And recipients would breathe a sigh of relief upon seeing such brevity.
- PR folks would actually develop decent handwriting (and, hey, let's face it... most of us can't handwrite worth a darn anymore... it's a lost art!)

What do you think? :-)

Optimism from marketing execs: "People are living lives of desperation."

From CMO magazine comes this gem, talking about the opportunities and benefits of using “real people” (I presume this means non-professional actors?) in advertising.

The Dove campaign for its firming cream, for example, has proved popular with consumers, but industry experts disagree on whether the ad is effective. “Using the average person won’t sell anything,” says Gerald Celente, director and founder of Trends Research Institute, a consultancy. “The purpose of advertising is to create desire beyond what the product can actually deliver. Do you want to see the floppy Big Mac that the fast food worker actually packages up and hands to you, or the perfect airbrushed billboard version? People are living lives of desperation; they don’t want to be themselves.”

This comment is so sad, I’m not quite sure where to start.  Indeed, there’s undeniably an element of fantasy involved in advertising; this explains Bud’s attention to buxom bikini babes breasts’ rather than beer drinking guys’ bodaciously bursting big bellies.  With that said, however, I resent and reject the implication that:

- All of us consumers are desperate, lonely, pathetic souls… deriving happiness and self-worth only from airbrushed airheads shilling soap.  Speak for yourself, Celente!
- Such condescending and pittying attitudes from overpaid marketing morons will endear consumers to any brand.

I can only hope that consulting firms such as Calente’s AND the advertisers that believe in such self-defeating tripe will themselves end up living lives of career desperation.

Click-to-call is the next big thing in Web advertising... but with a twist

I just read on Darren's Problogger.net site (via Threadwatch) that Google is testing out a pay-per-call feature in its AdWords program.

The way it works (so far in testing) is that Google places a little phone icon next to specific trial text ads where text AdWords ads are normally placed on the righthand side of Google search results pages.

When someone clicks on the phone icon, they get a call from Google and Google then connects them to the advertiser free of charge... of course, charging the advertiser an amount up to their max pay-per-call bid price.

IMHO, though, this is one layer away from being humungously useful to advertisers. As it's currently implemented, I think a lot of folks (like me!) would be apt to read the small text ad, click through to the site, and then decide whether to call the company from *there* or not.

And by that point, there's no easy way for the advertiser to know that I came via AdWords... which means that it's basically flying under the ROI radar. This may not seem like a horrible problem, but let me tell you... for some advertisers (like one of my clients, who spends over $150,000 a month on AdWords alone!), it's quite painful to wonder whether that cost-per-lead is unduly inflated because lots of customers are calling in their high-ticket orders rather than placing them on the company's Web site directly. With the latter, this client can see the conversions via Google's conversion tracker. With the former, the best the client can do is ask the purchaser "Where did you hear about us?" and 9 times out of 10, the person will say "Um, somewhere on the net" or maybe even "Google" but they'll hardly know whether they spotted this firm via a natural or AdWords listing!

* * *

So here's my idea: One of these companies... Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft (with its Ad Center, not yet released in the U.S.) should implement a special javascript code that displays -- on the advertiser's site! -- a tailored-per-client toll-free number when the referrer is a ad-click from Google, Y! or Microsoft. If the visitor isn't from one of their respective PPC programs, then the javascript code would default to simply showing the company's own default toll-free number.

And one of the coolest things about this is that it'd be VERY hard to game or click-fraud. If the engine set, for instance, a minimum call length before charging (say, 15 seconds), you're not going to get random "calling farms" in India making 16 second calls, IMHO :-).

Of course, really cheap-ass companies participating in the program could say "Oh, hi! Let me quickly get your number and call you back..." but -- especially when high-ticket items or subscriptions are at stake -- I don't think such behavior is likely. The annoyance of that would likely offset too much potential revenue from customers.

* * *

From at a technical perspective, I think this would be pretty easy to do. I understand that there might be some referrer-acknowledgement issues (e.g., people surfing in high-paranoid mode with referrer stuff turned off), but on the whole, I can imagine that advertisers would be willing to pay a premium for a visit + call... and consumers would be well-served, too.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I missing a key problem here?

Tips for corporate wannabe bloggers

Jeremy Zawodny recently posted that he's going to be speaking about blogging at the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference, and asked his readers what he should tell those folks.

Many people, understandably, responded that he should basically tell them to drop dead. Given the DMA's, ahem, relationship-challenged practices in the past (e.g., supporting opt-out, rather than opt-in e-mail lists), that's hardly surprising.

With that said, though, I figured it'd be worth it to suggest a few more friendly guidelines for the DMA folks, at least those genuinely interested in communicating decently and effectively with others online. Specifically, here's what I commented on Jeremy's blog:

* * *

Tell them to ask themselves this before they ever post anything on a blog:
"If you were out having a beer with someone you've recently become friends with, would you say this to their face?"

For instance, when you're (appropriately) talking a friend, you generally don't:
- shout
- hype
- badger
- monopolize
- ignore
- use fear

You do (or should), however:
- Talk like a human
- Listen
- Listen some more
- Respond appropriately
- Be sincere. No, *really* sincere, not faux sincere.
- Know your relationship-type. You don't hug and kiss a new friend and say "You're my best friend EVER!!!"

And the hardest, but IMHO most important:
Know yourself, know your limitations, and don't pretend to be someone you aren't. If you're a 300 pound frumpy housewife, you don't show up at a bar in a miniskirt and halter top to meet a friend. You'll embarrass yourself, you'll embarrass your friend, and no one will want to be seen with you, much less listen to you. For companies, this means that you shouldn't sweep who you are and what your history is under a rug; if you've had problems with a product or customer relationships, enter into a conversation humbly or even with an appropriate apologetic introduction. "We realize we haven't always worked with our customers in a way that would make our founder proud. Here's what we're doing to change that... and why we respectfully ask you to give us another chance."

Humility, thoughtfulness, subtlety, humanity. All attributes that the spam-defending DMA, sadly, seems to have in very short supply.

* * *

RELATED ENTRIES:
- Blogger Don'ts [from the consumer-side of blogging]

Fire these branding and advertising folks

Friend: "I checked out Blinx like you said but it's this site in German!?"
Me: "B-L-I-N-K-X. Interesting product, moronic name."

What were the folks behind Blinkx thinking? For what was undoubtedly slated to be a word-of-mouth product, why would any semi-intelligent marketing/branding person give their offering a name that could be so easily mistaken for something else?

Pop quiz (and don't peek back at the earlier paragraph)... what was their product named again?
A) Blinx
B) Blinkx
C) Blinks
D) Blinkz

The right answer is B. The other right answer is: fire the person who named that product.

And in a related example of advertising stupidity, there's the whole Tacoma / Dakota sophomoric ad campaign that's been on billboards everywhere lately, at least here in San Francisco.

The ads feature lame, swaggering comments alluding to the fact that the Tacoma is beefier and brawnier than the Dakota. Or -- wait! -- maybe it was the other way around.

The names of these vehicles, which apparently compete in the same market space, are so similar as to make it impossible for me to remember (much less care) which is which. Studies show that consumers weren't even able to recall what burger joint blitzed the airwaves with the comic "Where's the Beef?" ads; what are the odds that people will remember -- much less be swayed in their purchase decisions -- by billboards which consistently mix in mentions of two similarly named products?

Blue Bash: Babelicious but Beset by Bad Branding. Bummer :(

I just got back from the Blue Lithium party at the swanky Ruby Skye nightclub in San Francisco, which was the official closing shindig of the amazingly popular AdTech conference this week.

Verdict: Largely lousy. Here's why:

- The music was so loud it was nearly impossible to carry on a conversation. Even from literally more than one foot away. For a networking event, the inability to do any networking is a serious liability, IMHO.
- There were no quiet areas at all.
- The floor was sticky. Everywhere.
- Alcohol wasn't free. And it sure as hell wasn't cheap, either.

All of that might have been at least slightly forgiven, especially given the simply fabulous trapeze show featuring some amazingly talented Cirque du Soleil performers.

But Blue Lithium -- the generous but not-too-savvy sponsor of the event -- bombed where it really counts: in the branding.

Sure, there were Blue Lithium banners galore. But what many of us will remember the event for -- painfully -- is the atrociously awkward 10-15 minutes right after the breathtaking trapeze act, in which:
- A couple of Blue Lithium folks got up to say a few words about the party and their company, but were mostly rendered unintelligible due to sound system problems.
- They spent at least five minutes experiencing technical problems, trying to get a Flash presentation to show (with sound) to a bunch of already-antsy and just-wanting-to-dance-and-drink party-goers.
- The five minute (but seemingly much longer) presentation itself -- a casebook example of how *NOT* to sell to anyone, much less a bunch of impatient drunken revelers -- was so laden with sickly-cheerful and obnoxiously-effusive marketing speak and tech-jargon that at least a few folks around me were actually starting to boo. The rest of the crowd, at minimum, rolled their eyes. A guy next to me commented: "If their marketing guy isn't fired tomorrow morning, I'll be really surprised." I agree.

* * *

So what does the Blue Lithium company actually do? Don't ask me. Something about advertising, I think... which really isn't all that much of a stretch, given that the conference was about advertising. Would I ever recommend Blue Lithium to a client? Given the fact that they spent undoubtedly tens of thousands of dollars on this event and managed to stupendously squander their good will with marketing incompetence, I'd have to say they're certainly not likely to be at the top of my recommendation list.

* * *

In stark contrast with this was the "Google Dance 2003" party I attended. How so? Well, Google offered:

- Free booze
- Free food
- $300 gift certificates for their AdWords service!
- Actual product demonstrations, tech Q&A, and other very useful substantive offerings... OFF the dance floor... that complemented rather than interrupted the party.
- A great selection of environments and stuff to do, since it was held in a comfy park rather than a swanky closed club. There was the loud and pulsing dance floor (complete with jumbo-tron style video screen), tables for sitting down and eating, a large (and quieter) grassy area with blankets to sit on, bouncy balls to kick, a fooseball table to play on, and much more. And most importantly, there was plenty of room and opportunity to network, chat, schmooze, and shake your booty.

In other words, Google managed to cater to the interests of a broad variety of folks, present a large swath of its services to OPENLY interested businesspeople, and did so probably without spending all that much more than Blue Lithium did to rent the no-doubt-awfully-expensive Ruby Skye club.

At the party this evening, I was just one of many folks who looked bewildered, annoyed, and bored (the fact that the music was, IMHO, downright sucky didn't help matters). Whereas at the Google party, I think the pictures speak for themselves.

* * *

Sure, I feel a bit bad that I'm being such an ungrateful jerk about the Blue Lithium event. But I prefer to think of it as tough love; if enough folks communicate their displeasure as bluntly as I have here, Blue Lithium will likely save a lot of money and quite a bit of anguish in the future.

Customer disservice

I've been seeing more and more companies bragging about their refund policy: "No Questions Asked."

Well, how dumb is that! Personally, I'd like to think that when I decide to cancel a service or return a product, the company actually gives a damn about what I think and is intent upon either addressing my concern personally and/or fixing their product.

How about "No Hassle Cancellations" or "No Hassle Returns"? Now that's a promise I'd appreciate!

Forget marketing, just gimme the darn info, please!

After buying a cordless phone for my new apartment a while back, I learned -- after the 30 day free-return period -- that the stupid thing didn't have the capability to turn the ringer off. Given that I receive junk faxes at all hours of the day and night, this is a pretty important feature that's missing, since my phone is in my bedroom and I don't fancy being woken up several times in the middle of the night.

So, after an extended period of cheapness and stubbornness (just disconnecting the phone at night), I decided that it's time for me to get a new cordless phone.

You'd think that this would be a relatively pleasant and painless process. And you'd be wrong.

First stop, Amazon.com, a retailer I've trusted and appreciated for a long time.

Hmm... no info on whether any of their listed phones let one turn off the ringer. Adjustable volume? Check. But actually turning it off? Nope.

So, undaunted, I found a few phones on Amazon.com that were within my price range, noted the item numbers, and then googled for the info:

"GE cordless 25893GE3 manual"

Lots of unrelated crap, and -- for other related searches -- lots of spam, including one link that redirected me to ebay. And not even the phones section of ebay, just the front page. Charming.

Pressing on, I decided to go to GE's Web site.
Which led me to Thomson Electronics site.
Whereupon I had to download a PDF manual.
Which didn't say anything whatsoever about being able to turn the ringer off.

This was now turning into an unstoppable quest. I WAS going to find this information, dangit, because I had nothing more important to do on a Friday afternoon, like my laundry, or job searching, or my taxes, or answering my backlog of a few thousand e-mails, and so on.

---

So I called up GE.
After navigating through a deliriously long menu, I found that -- surprise -- they offered assistance for everything -- TVs, VCRs, Camcorders -- except for their cordless phones. I pressed "4" for audio anyway. Hey, a phone has audio, right?

After waiting on hold for a few moments, I was transferred to someone who insisted I had to register to ask any questions. She needed my name, address, telephone number, and...

"Whoa, whoa... I just have a simple question!" I protested. "I don't own this phone. I don't need to be on file for a warranty. I just need info!"

Clearly reading from her script, the teledroid apologized, but insisted that she had to enter this information in her computer in order to access the information I requested. I had fun coming up with fake info for her, but not enough fun that I forgot I was spending my time and long distance money on this stupid endeavor.

---

She then asked me -- three times -- whether I was a business or a consumer, and also what the serial number was on the item I needed info for. "I... DON'T... HAVE...A... SERIAL... NUMBER!" I said, not quite shouting, but certainly emphatically. I explained, once again, that I didn't own this phone [and, I wanted to add, at this rate, would likely never, ever, ever think of buying it], so I couldn't possibly have a serial number [unless she wanted me to make that up, too].

Finally, the moment I had been waiting for. I was cleared to ask my oh-so-detailed question -- "Does cordless phone model 25893GE3 have an option to turn off the ringer?"

Then she put me on hold. For ten minutes.

"Sir...?" she came back with, tentatively, "I'm sorry, but I'm not able to obtain that information. The phone is either too new or too old, and I don't have access to the manual."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

---

The moral of this story, because of course, every good blog entry should have a moral, is DON'T FRIGGIN' BUY GE PHONES!

No, no, wait, that's not quite it. I bet I'd get a similar runaround from other cordless phone manufacturers.

The moral, actually, is one that I wish to pound home to all the consumer electronic companies out there:

Take a fraction of the money you're now spending making shiny happy neato packaging and the cash you're spending on cutesy and gee-whiz advertising, and put it towards making information about your products more accessible.

Oh yeah, and revising your horrid pre-sales service.

Maybe there aren't enough people like me who actually care about what we're gonna be spending $60-$150 on, but I'd like to hope that others might appreciate knowing a bit more about their purchases before they plunk down their hard-earned cash.

What was Disney thinking?

As you may have heard by now, Disney has begun field-testing its "EZ-D" DVDs that self-destruct after 48 hours.

Understandably, environmentalists are up in arms. But while I share in their disdain for this wasteful format, I have a different question to ask: What bozo set the price for these discs at $7 each?!

For about $7, I can go see a matinee on a BIG screen.
For about $8 on average, including shipping and handling, I can buy DVDs from a DVD club (via their intro package).
For about $10, I can actually buy single used DVDs (without any quality degredation), or -- on sale -- often new DVDs.
Via many online services, I can rent a DVD, complete with free postage-paid mailer, for about $3.

$7 for a disposable time-limited piece of plastic? It's not just an animated character that's Goofy, that's for sure.

Questioning desires and assumptions about music

Yes, it's been a while since I've posted, and no, I won't apologize. I've been busy... not (just) picking my nose, but picking things to write about.

Additionally, dear reader, I've been spending much of the last few weeks delving even deeper into online music services, evaluating my own music habits and interests, and planning a rather major undertaking of a site about online music services. Yes, you heard it here first ;-).

Much of this has come about during the seemingly mundane process of ripping my 350+ CDs to digital files on my computer. Allow me to explain...

My vast CD collection, probably like many of yours, has been sitting in the corner of my room, collecting dust and -- were it to speak -- would probably moan, "Adam, why hast thou forsaken me?" Indeed, until recently, I don't think I had listened to one of my CDs in literally years, what with the proliferation of song availability via legal and :cough: questionable online music services.

Upon ripping my CDs, I realized that I had well over 5,000 tracks, just waiting to be heard... some for the first time ever. I boggled my mind with the geeky calculation that, yes, I could listen to an album's-worth every day, and it'd still take me more than a year to go through my existing collection.

"What am I doing paying for two different online services," I asked myself, "when I haven't even listened to a fraction of the music I already own?" The fact that I now had every single one of my songs, originally on CD, now available for instant-listening on my PC intensified this soul-searching and budget-questioning.

"Psst!" whispered the ConsumptionDevil, perched playfully on my left shoulder, "It's just $14 or so a month for the two services, ya cheapskate. Isn't that a small price to pay for SUCH a FABULOUS collection of music at your fingertips? Do you really want to be stuck with those musty old relics from the 80's? And besides, you pay more for one lousy night out at the movies!"

"But it's not just about the money," I argued, probably prompting my roommate to wonder why I was mumbling to myself yet again, "It's a matter of time. Why should I spend my limited free time browsing Napster and MusicMatch, searching for tunes, making my own custom radio stations, and so on... when I can just click a few buttons and be listening to fine music I already have?"

---

Ah ha! I thought. Now I have him, that seemingly sly devil of consumerist greed. Always wanting more, always wanting the latest. Well, I showed him! I'm taking my life back and...

"Not so fast, smarty!" he retorted, dismissing my arguments with a cynical glance, "If you have hopes of holding yourself out as an expert in the Digital Music arena, don't you need to actually experience and test what you write about? Your credibility and future employment is at stake. And besides, from a pure enjoyment standpoint, aren't you always just itching to hear what everyone's talking about? That new record, that promising artist, the new musical you've read critical raves about... your old CDs tie you to the past, whereas the new music services allow you to explore the present and the future. Don't be a luddite, Adam, for goodness sake!"

{sigh} He had me. But I'm an exceptional case (or, as my parents would say, patting my head, "special"). What about the rest of the world?

---

To the normal music enthusiast, the Napsters and iTunes and all may prove initially tempting, especially as the KaZaAs of the world become increasingly risky and inconvenient. But will there come a point where these folks, too, stop and ask themselves... what *AM* I doing with 10,000 music files on my hard drive? Sure, my shiny new iPod can now hold all 10K of 'em, but so what?

People will eventually question, I think, not whether they need to regularly acquire and own track after track, but whether the attendant hassles are really worth it. Storing, organizing, and -- this is the scary part -- backing up or moving to a new computer -- gigs upon gigs of music... is this really any fun? With CDs, you simply boxed 'em up and took them with you. Barring scratches or theft, there wasn't much of a worry. Your CDs would work everywhere, never expire, and always be correctly labeled.

In contrast, your iTunes files won't work on most Windows programs and they won't work on any portable player except an iPod. Your Napster files will work on most (but not all) Windows programs, but won't be playable on a Mac or on an iPod. And unless you authorize additional computers (and, if needed, de-authorize previously-used computers), you won't be able to play ANY of your online-music-service acquired files on your friend's laptop or your new computer at work.

---

When I ask my friends about music, they almost unanimously scoff at server-based solutions (such as streaming), and insist that they want "a personal copy" of any music they like. I wonder if they will always think this way. For me, at least, the thought of having someone else (whether it's Napster, Microsoft, Apple, or another party) store ALL my music and allow me to listen to it anywhere remotely (with my choice of software, however) is increasingly tempting, especially as broadband connections become more commonplace.

Will consumers eventually opt for convenience over ownership? Or is ownership, in fact, synonymous with overall convenience? And more philosophically, will people soon realize that what they wish for may be more than they want to handle? When "I want every song by the Beatles and ABBA and Linkin Park and... and... and...!" dovetails with free or cheap availability of music, particularly in high-bitrate-encoding, translating into a few hundred gigabytes of personal storage requirements... will people still be so keen on 'having it all'? Or will the clutter finally catch up to them?

I honestly can't say.

Then again, knowing the increasingly insatiable consumer demands to own more, newer, better... those musty CDs may indeed prove to be no match for innovation and the celestial downloadable jukebox.

---

What are your thoughts? And in particular, if money were no object, how would you have your music?

On selfishness, obsolescence, and jubilant consumers

Several organizations are throwing up (their arms) in wild fear of their job sectors going the way of the dodo.

For instance, unless you've been living in a cave for the last few months, you probably already know about the new federal program which will block around 80% of telemarketing calls for those who sign up on the free national Do Not Call list.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is livid. They cry that their revenues will plummet... and -- surprise! -- they plan to sue the government.

Of course, the charming DMA has also been dragging its feet on spam-reform, typically complaining that bills which limit spam are violating the rights of businesses and harming first amendment issues. Besides, they argue indirectly, some people may really want, nay, NEED to know about the latest cable descrambler or debt reduction miracle!

And these spokespeople are still able to sleep at night, or at least write their laughable press releases with a straight face? Perhaps they went to the same PR training school as Hilary Rosen of the RIAA.

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What's particularly ironic, of course, is that organizations like the DMA and RIAA aren't just working against consumers (which is obvious), they're counterproductively styming progress and profits in their own industries.

Napster wasn't the first RIAA target, you know. This same organization screamed that CD's were going to kill off cassette tapes (well, true) and devastate the record industry. Just like the movie industry likened the VCR to the Boston Strangler and filed lawsuits to prevent the destruction of the entertainment world (yeah, right!).

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So here we have the DMA wringing its hands about a program which is going to result in them learning which consumers do not wish to be solicited on the phone. In other words, the DMA is upset that they're going to be unable to contact non-prospects! Excuse me? Shouldn't this be a blessing for them? The federal government has created and implemented an infrastructure -- at relatively little cost to the DMA -- that will enable the DMA member companies to focus their time on those mutants, er, citizens who are so lonely that they WANT to be sold stuff via the telephone.

Pre-qualified customers. What could be better?!?

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Even if the DMA is right and this law reduces sales in the short term, I have two things to say to that:
1) Diversity your marketing.
2) I'm so sorry you're not going to be able to make money at the expense of interrupting my dinner.

Sponsor a ballet. Create an affiliate program. Give away freebies. Or -- here's a radical idea -- go the route of the original once-scrappy Google and actually create a product or service of such quality and usefulness that no marketing is required. That's right... think about it. Did you ever see an ad for Google's search tool? No, you didn't, because Google grew to 250 million queries PER DAY purely based upon word of mouth. There's a lesson to be learned here, though I fear the DMA may be too dense to grasp it.

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Of course, other industries are running scared, too. Tax preparers might have to wait tables if we ever got someone in high office bold and savvy enough to REALLY reform and simplify taxes. Gee, I wonder which lobbying organizations have been thwarting true tax reform in Washington?

Search engine optimization folks (the people who claim to get your site listed higher in the search engines) are increasingly screaming that Google's populist yet secretive algorithms are harming their bottom lines. Some have (gee, imagine this) filed suit against Google.

Boo hoo, I say. Would anyone really miss the telemarketers, the tax preparers, the search engine optimization folks? At the end of the day, do they inherently make our world a better or even more useful place?

And most importantly, isn't it time that laws and society tilted towards the consumers' interests and needs instead of the frantic and often misguided demands of selfish career interest groups?

Affiliate programs... offline? Yes!

In the previous entry, I mentioned the hard-sell tactics that my gym uses when trying to strong arm potential members into becoming paying members.

I'd like to suggest that my gym -- and many other "non-online" entities -- could greatly benefit by replacing traditional (and often annoying) selling techniques with affiliate programs.

Yes, I'm talking about that system popularized by Amazon.com in which current members are incented to recruit new or additional business for a company in exchange for commissions. Amazon was, of course, far from the first to offer such incentives, but it has done so successfully on such a mind-boggling scale --engaging literally millions of affiliates -- that it should be apparent to other companies that this strategy is worth trying out.

After all, who is better qualified to get my friends interested in a gym membership: some slickster who lies about "last day!" opportunities (every month) and uses arguments unsurprisingly ill-received by my friends... or me -- a three-year-member who enthusiastically attends gym classes at multiple locations and gets greeted like "Norm!" on Cheers... and who *gasp* knows my friends.

In case you weren't absolutely certain, the correct answer to the above mini-quiz is ME. Yes, yours truly. And in a larger sense, any long-time or otherwise loyal member.

Yet, I'm given no incentives to sign up friends at my gym. 24 Hour Fitness instead turns my visiting friends off by often making them endure hard-sell "orientation" sessions when my friends and I simply want to make it on time to a particular kickboxing class.

Believe me, if the gym just left them alone and let the gym sell itself, they'd piss off fewer people (members AND their friends) and they'd likely get more members.

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How about this for a poster in my gym?

You love this gym. Spread the love, get up to $500 in FitnessCash.

That's right. We appreciate your enthusiasm and loyalty of our valued members and know that it's people like you who help make 24 Hour Fitness welcoming and successful. Therefore, we'd like to offer you five free day passes to give to any of your friends that live in the Bay Area. No hard-sell, only a short liability form for them to sign. We're confident that after you show them around, they'll love this gym as much as you do.

And when one of your friends signs up for a two year contract, we'll give you $50 to spend on anything at 24 Hour Fitness that you'd like. Massages, supplements, any service or product sold here. You can get up to $500 per year!.

Our members make the difference. So share in the rewards -- you've earned it!

Two year memberships cost at least $500. That's a 10% or smaller acquisition cost (actually much less, since the money's getting plugged back into the gym). And probably considerably less than what the member acquisition cost is when paying the in-house sales folks. ;-)

We're already bombarded by too much marketing, right? But...

Ads on buses, ads in school gyms, ads on urinals nowadays, for goodness sakes. Isn't all the marketing and advertising a bit much sometimes?

Yes. But yesterday, I was nonetheless thinking of missed cross-promotional opportunities. See what an MBA does?! :-)

Within half-a-block of one of the gyms I frequent, there's a Jamba Juice. For those in the un-know, this is a chain that offers delightfully quick, healthy, refreshing, and yummy drinks... fruit and yogurt smoothies and the like... for about $4 each. Perfect for after a tough workout. And no, they didn't just pay me to write that :-)

So anyway, as I was enjoying a particularly delicious peanut butter / banana / chocolate / yogurt / fiber smoothie (can you tell I'm hungry tonight!?) after the gym at Jamba Juice yesterday, I wondered why I didn't see more fellow gym folks there.

And that's when something clicked. Wouldn't it make sense for my gym ("24 Hour Fitness") to do cross-promotions with Jamba Juice? Heck, one of the 24 Hour Fitness locations already has a Jamba Juice in-house; why haven't the others made the connection?

* * *

At any gym, after all, you have a lot of rather health-conscious and thirsty people. At Jamba Juice, I'm sure one'd find lots of generally health-conscious folks who also like to (or at least tend to) exercise.

And yet, I see most of the 24 Hour Fitness branches dumbly trying to go about cross-selling other stuff directly. Buy this overpriced supplement here at the gym. Check out this paltry selection of (similarly overpriced) clothing, along with a rack of stuff we've had to discount because it's collected dust for 18 months.

Wouldn't it be smarter for my gym to offer $1 coupons to the Jamba Juice one block away, and a 10% coupon for the Nutrition/Vitamin store down the street? Heck, why not a Healthy Discounts card for members... get 10% off shoes, Powerbars, mineral water, etc...? Or, to keep it simpler, why not just cross-promote with a nearby store like Jamba Juice? Why try to (unsuccessfully) supply all of members' needs directly in-house?

In return in my scenario, the stores featured in the discounts would then feature corresponding marketing initiatives inviting people to check out 24 Hour Fitness. Buying some new cross-trainers at Footlocker? Wear 'em in at some great kickboxing classes at 24 Hour Fitness with this free day pass and $50 off your initiation fee. Purchasing a smoothie? Now that you've fueled up, clock some miles on the bikes or relax in the hot tub at the 24 Hour Fitness down the block!

With such targeted cross-promotions, many folks would come out ahead, and of course, both 24 Hour Fitness and the participating partners would acquire quite a bit of awareness and likely new customers.

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In contrast with the above-described cross-promotional ideas, intrusive marketing and advertising is annoying and often fruitless. All the damn mortgage telemarketing calls I regularly receive (during dinner hour, of course) are of no use to me, since I rent. And spamwise, my female roommate does NOT need a larger penis. Really.

Unfortunately, it's crap like this that gives the rest of marketing and advertising a bad name, even when it's creative, innovative, and thoughtfully targeted and executed... perhaps giving some large chains like 24 Hour Fitness cold-feet when it comes to extended marketing initiatives.

And that's a shame. I'd much rather my gym throw some coupons at me than sic their uber-annoying sales droids at any guest I happen to bring through the door.