The Halloween of marketing ..

I am writing this blog hoping that there are enough tax payers reading this that it is worthwhile. If you are somebody that has opted to spend your entire life on welfare and never paid a penny into the ‘ever flowing’ pot then this is not a post for you, sit this one out.

Right, now that they have gone, today is a 101 in how not to market your company. We are all familiar with the brown envelopes that HMRC use to shuttle their letters of doom around the country are we not? As tax payers we are also all familiar with that sinking feeling that comes with seeing said envelope on your doormat.

It always seems to be a bright and happy morning, steaming hot brew in hand, when you spot the dreaded brown envelope hiding in the pile on the doormat. The ensuing feeling of dread as you contemplate whether to open it now or wait is something that we all experience. The truth is, much like removing a plaster, the answer is that the pain has to come whether it is now or later.

Many of those letters, of course, are routine they are innocent updates that are of little or no consequence, these are the good ones. But even after you open the letter and realise that nothing is needed from you, other than to file the correspondence, your mood doesn’t return to its previous high. Once that brown envelope has poisoned your day nothing can bring it back, it is just one of those facts of life.

Now if you think that you have had a bad day, not performed as well as you could have or achieved all of your aims, think on for a moment. Somewhere there is a marketing guy who thought to himself….. if we mimic HMRC’s delivery then we will never be ignored as junk mail. Not only does this utter moron exist, he must have worked for several companies (I cannot believe multiple people are actually that stupid).

This actually ran through the mind of a functioning adult. When faced with the challenge of ensuring marketing was viewed and not discarded without opening this whiz kid decided to make it look like a satanic love note. He actually thought ‘hmm nobody throws HMRC letters out’ and, well that is probably as far as he got!

In the vain hope that this utter madman sees this post let me remind him that the bottom drops out of most taxpayers worlds when they see the dreaded brown envelope. So, unless you are trying to market yourself to the welfare mob, you have failed at the first hurdle. I am pissed off before I even open the envelope so your marketing is setting off on the back foot.

Its ok though, when I open it I will be relieved right? Wrong, see above, you have pissed on my bonfire and throwing a bit of kindling back on it won’t get it roaring like it was. You will get my attention though, that much is true. I will check who you are to ensure that I never use your business. In fact, this goes out to the safety sign people, I will go out of my way to not purchase from you.

Seriously, I brought a sign off these guys years ago and every 6 months or so I get a thick pamphlet jammed into the standard brown envelope. They even put a letter in the front so that the window in the envelope looks just like HMRCs finest, every time it gets me. Every time this particular delight lands on my door mat I remind myself that I will never again use this company.

I would willingly pay twice the price rather than use a firm that uses such awful marketing tactics. Further to this I would even go so far as to email them a copy of the invoice explaining why they lost this sale. You know what? you lost it because you listened to that f*cking cretin. You fell for his marketing BS, you actually thought that this shit would work. Well it doesn’t, every 6 months you f*ck up my day so have a lost sale for your efforts.

I would close by saying that not all brown envelopes are doom but I know that I cannot reassure you, we will always see the worse in them. I am, instead, off to buy a sign that I don’t need just to prove a point!

Advisors, hookers and a great meal

Today’s rant of the day is shitripadvisor and yes I am aware that it has featured in previous rants thank you.

Let us commence by establishing what this ‘service’ is. It provides a means for people to share their own reviews of a business and this is a key point since the reviews are not owned by the business the business has no real rights over them or, critically in my opinion, ability to reject them.

So the latest review to grind my gears is a 1 star rating which is as low as you can go. Obviously these people had a terrible time, presumably their beer was rancid, the temperature was wrong and they got splinters from the furniture that were so bad that they required surgery? Well so you would think but then you, and I , would be wrong. In fact the reason for this terrible rating was …….. I don’t serve food. Hang on a minute I am a f*cking pub! I do not purport to provide a dining experience nor do I advertise one.

How does the failure to provide a service result in one star? If I visit the bakery down the road can I provide one star because there were no hookers available? Can Johnny rate me one star because I don’t sell wallpaper? How ridiculous is this? So I went for walk and was a little peckish, I popped into the bookies, well one star all around because those bastards don’t do bacon rolls!

This is beyond ludicrous and how does one respond? I penned a quick response:

“I am very sorry that the Plough did not meet your expectations on this occasion. Could I suggest that next time you open your f*cking eyes and check for clues you bastard cretin”

I thought that was a little harsh so tried again:

“Could I suggest that you obtain a copy of the island guide which is produced annually and makes no mention of food at the Plough. I am sure that you have a copy but the later ones are now in colour and show prices in decimal”

This still seemed overly angry so I looked again:

“I am sorry that on this occasion the Plough did not meet your needs which were, presumably, based on memories from previous visits. Could you please tell me if you liked the rest of the island and approved of the absence of steam trains and horse and carts!”

Of course none of these made it to ‘print’ because you just can’t do that. Instead I published a wishy-washy apology for any ‘misunderstanding’. This doesn’t change the rating though, the prick who chose one star is responsible for it, he owns it, and it remains a lonely star, a solitary blot on my review landscape.

What is doubly irritating, for both Nick and myself, is that we go to great lengths to explain where somebody can get food we don’t just say “no”. So not only did this half wit  give the pub an , unjustified,  appalling rating but he did it with a full belly from one of the many local establishments that we recommend. We fed you, we actually ensured that you were given sustenance and not left for dead on the beach to become a feast for the seagulls and this is how you repay us.

Of course we don’t take this sort of thing personally, we get loads of great reviews and one idiot cannot spoil that. But if you were in the pub a few weeks ago and spotted me and Nick stroking beards and looking into space it may just be that we were contemplating just who to exact revenge upon…..

Empty jam and streetwalkers

I have had a number of people ask me for an update on my current health status so I shall start there today. I am struggling to beat Ms Nature down but, like any pigheaded man, I haven’t let that stop me.  Mornings and evenings are becoming more painful as the wrists seek to reduce my ‘window of operation’ and righty has remembered what fun it is to generate sharp spasms at random times.

Of course I have considered the increased levels of pain and the potential causes and consequences and arrived at a structured plan to rehabilitate. There are two facets to my plan, the first is to ignore any pain and the second is to increase the exercise. My approach has yet to yield improvements but I am confident that a good dose of stubborn will change that in due course.

In other news I think I experience cabbie jealousy over the weekend when picking up my children. Despite several attempts at conversation the driver was resolutely mute until my children got in the car, at which point he wouldn’t shut up. This was more than just conversation, I swear every time my daughter opened her mouth he had to tell a better story, there was a definite case of “he is my friend”.

I would also like to share with you the insanity of tourists. On Sunday I watched as a couple slowly realised that there was no longer a rush to get their young child to the toilet, nothing unusual in that. They proceeded to change said child’s clothing and pack up the rest of their kit and at this point made an odd decision. They placed the wet, or more accurately soiled, clothes on the wall, I can’t fathom why. I can see that they didn’t want to take the dirty clothes home but what was the purpose in leaving them to dry? Were they hoping that when dry somebody would use them without realising? Or perhaps they just thought that such a wonderous thing as child sized denim would astound the locals and left them there for our ‘museum of the future’?

This brings me to rants of the week, the first is to the delightful grocery home delivery service. Part of my groceries last week was a bath mat set, you know the deal a bath mat and a toilet pedestal mat. When I unpacked I found just a bath mat, despite the packaging saying that it was ” two piece”. When I called the other side of the planet, hey why do it in England, they asked if I had received the item and I explained that I had received half of it. I will acknowledge that this was my mistake as the call centre apologised and said that they would refund half of the value. But I don’t have any need for half of a set I responded, indeed they were more than welcome to have the half back  but the problem was that technically I had received the item.

In the end my cell phone signal came to the rescue and dumped the call, when I called back,and regaled the new call centre person with my analogy regarding empty pots of jam having no value despite the pot technically being present, I was rewarded with a refund, in full no less.

The second rant is against UKIP, well actually all of the self-serving, leaching politicians and their street walking cronies. I have a postal vote, I exercised it on Saturday and the envelope which I carried, on that same day, to the post office was most obviously my vote. At this stage my selection is clearly complete so why on earth do you feel the need to assault me on the street? As a rational citizen of the country I have deliberated over the pool of hopeless, arrogant liars that I have to choose from and selected the one who makes my skin crawl the least. When you assault me in the street you change the leaderboard and make me want to remove my support from your particular cretin but the system does not allow me to.

If I open the envelope my vote spoils and my voice is not heard. I am under no illusion that my voice counts you understand but hell I have done my bit, I have selected my cretin so leave me alone. Take note of the comedy sized envelope labeled A or whatever it says and get the hell out of my way. Or perhaps I am misreading the whole scenario, I presumed that these people were simply ignoring the envelope but perhaps they were targeting me. Perhaps this was all some plan to spoil my vote? No, I think not, that would involve a level of intelligence way above that of a politician.