I’m glad we’re not the only ones who were amused by Uncle Gene’s Donuts in Hong Kong. Their differentiator seems to be “American”-style donuts although what they serve is a mini-donuts and a variety of dipping sauces, such as chocolate syrup. It was funny to see your own culture misinterpreted and productized in another context. Complete with cartoon mascots aplenty!
From the outer ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker.
The hang-tag reads:
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JASMINE
I get 14 days,
336 hours,
20,160 minutes,
1,209,600 seconds of
DO-NOT-DISTURB-ME-I’M-ON-VACATION
time a year.
And I’m going to enjoy every one of them.
And, we see Jasmine, lying in a hammock, reading a book. No laptop in sight. But this is an ad for AT&T. What are they telling us? In teeny tiny type at the bottom, we see
Jasmine relies on the most complete and secure network from AT&T so she can have DSL high speed Internet access to find more unique and exciting places to relax and unwind.
So, what’s this an ad for? Using the Internet to find places to sit and relax? Or, in fact, using AT&T’s secure network (and it’s also a complete network) to access the Internet? In order to find places to relax and unwind?
It just doesn’t really cohere for me. It’s almost a good effort – showing the benefit of using a technology by showing what it enables. But the claim that somehow DSL (and not just DSL but the special kind of quality DSL that AT&T offers) has afforded her sitting in a hammock is just too disjointed, and not very credible.
How on earth would we ever be able to relax out in the wild if we didn’t have DSL?! Lame and confusing ad, I think.
After my recent challenges booking with Marriott
, I encountered a similar level of weirdness with Starwood. I was trying to book a room (for a conference, using their conference-rate link) and couldn’t seem to log into my account. I haven’t used it for a while and naturally don’t have a clue as to my username and password (more specifically – I can’t remember what format they require my username and password to be in; if I knew that I could probably reconstruct them both). I went through the various helpful links (Forgot your password? Forgot your username?) to try and resolve it. When asked for my membership number I pulled out my Starwood Preferred Guest card and entered the number, only to be told that something to the effect that I needed to enter a number in the proper format. I’m looking at the screeen, I’m looking at my card – the numbers are exact. But no, not valid. Okay, I try something else – I give ’em my email address and they email me a new password and remind me of my username. I go back and try to log in using the newly issued/reset password. Nope, it doesn’t know who I am.
What the hell?
I finally contact them for help, after screwing around for way too long with this.
The website was not accepting your above Starwood Preferred Guest account number because your account had reached an expired status as of March 31, 2004, resulting in any remaining Starpoints being forfeited.
Starpoints do not expire for active accounts. Accounts are considered active as long as you have earned Starpoints as a result of activities at participating Starwood Properties or as a result of use of the Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card from American Express during the previous twelve months.
I am pleased to tell you that your account has been reactivated to enable you to view your above Starwood Preferred Guest number online.
Whoah. First of all, their technology is absolutely complete broken. If the account is suspended, then the error message should say something like that, not simply reject the account number as not being valid. Or the failure-to-logon info should provide some information that suggests they know who I am but won’t let me on for some reason. And they shouldn’t reset my password and then refuse to let me log on with it.
But really, WTF? Why would they de-activate my online login for inactivity?
And beyond that, it gets really punitive! I have forfeited my Starpoints? The language is just so wrong, so haughty. This is not service, and this is not going to encourage loyalty. Did I have any Starpoints? I have no clue, I don’t care. I’ve held onto their damn card for years, but that isn’t enough of a committment to Starwood, I’m not active, so I’ve been forfeited and also deactivated.
The net effect here is not to motivate me to toe the line and be a good Starwood customer, but rather to vote with my feet. They’ve got my money this time (and it’s actually the conference money but whatever) but next time, I will look for someone else.
Oh, and even though my profile indicated I don’t want to receive marketing email from them, by making a reservation with them they reset that and bury a line about opting-out in the confirmation email.
This is a bad company.
‘Star Wars Kid’ settles out of court
Mr. Raza — who appears on the video as a chubby, ungainly young man — recalled how other students got on tables and chanted taunts at him. ‘There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos…Any opportunity was good enough to shout ‘Star Wars!’ ‘
He said in one class, where a document was shown through a projector, other students scrolled the text, mimicking the opening of the movie, as they sang the Star Wars theme.
And whenever he was in a public place, he said, strangers would call to him.
“Hey! It’s Ghyslain Raza! Star Wars Kid, hey!”
He left the school and eventually, got a private tutor.
The article is fairly sketchy about the specific torment this kid suffered, and we don’t know how detailed the court case was either, of course. It seems from this piece that being called “Star Wars Kid” was the worst of it. On the face of it, that isn’t necessarily an insult? Of course, an insult is a cultural contruction – we give words power and choose how to parse them. The article doesn’t describe physical harm, threats, or any detailed humiliation besides being called “Star Wars Kid.” The headline of the article, of course, calls him “Star Wars Kid.” I’m not saying it wouldn’t suck incredibly to have a video of you on the Internet (although the article focuses on the humiliation that took place locally, in the school itself, rather than what would happen to this poor kid if he walked down the street in any city). Presumably, since the lawsuit dealt with schoolmates, that’s going to be the focus.
Some recent searches leading to this blog
‘Be Kind’ ‘Please Rewind’ sticker picture
blair bartrem
literal grapevine
myanmar.com.tw
gambian websites
tiger power cereal
stickers
wells fargo sucks balls
ogoplex
flip clock
john kimble
messy homes
i need a bigger ass
little people kiss
Andrew Weil Plantidote Mega-mushroom Supplement reviews
susser
spittle train station pictures
mel’s bowl redwood City
jerry hirschberg accountant
UPS Mail Innovations Origin RPF
(click on picture to see it full-size)
Here’s an ad for LG mobile phones that I pulled out of a recent issue of SPIN magazine. It’s sort of odd/interesting to see the rhetoric of design and marketing used to create content for advertising. I’m referring to the need to create personas that represent some aspect of the user category that can be designed for, or marketed to. And sometimes the distinction between designing for and marketing to is blurred through the use of personas. And sometimes the personas represent an aspirational statement of the manufacturer -who they’d like their customers to be, or what they would like their products to be used for. Whether or not the products actually achieve that doesn’t seem to matter, as long as there’s a catchy phrase to represent in the simplest terms possible some key attributes.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on this approach and on LG-specifically. I have no idea if an ad creative repurposed actual content or just picked up on the approach because it reads well and maybe moves product. It’s always interesting to see one form of internal company behavior make its way into advertising, though.
AutoWeek takes a look at corporate culture, management structures, and the resulting impact on getting good stuff made and into customer’s hands. They focus on Honda’s flat organization and support for product development initiatives that come from staffers.
No big committees. No bureaucracies. No layers of decision makers reviewing the decisions of the previous layer of decision makers, who in turn, reviewed the decisions handed up from the previous layer.
“We empower people to make good decisions,” says Flint, who was chief engineer on the Ridgeline pickup. “If you can build the business case for something, you can pretty much run with it here.”
Bullshit punditry from 37signals
Call off the expensive market research and fire the analysts and consultants.
Here’s a great way to find out if a company that makes physical products respects their products and their customers: if there’s a sticker on the product, and it peels off cleanly (and without tearing), then they’re a respectful company. If it tears or leaves sticky residue that you need to scrape off with a razor, then they don’t.
It’s that simple.
What is the ridiculous need to make a big noise by oversimplifying something to the point of absolute stupidity? Stickers are the only measure? It’d be great to suggest this as an interesting indicator of the user-centric nature of a business, but the overboarding is silly, falsely passionate, and hurts useful (and actionable) discourse. The little diatribe is poorly written, to boot. Is the reader the company (who should fire their consultants) or the annoyed consumer (who has no consultants to fire)?
I’m reminded (unhappily) of a previous rabble-rousing-yet-shallow battle cry against flip-charts.
As the Simpsons cynically told us:
Lisa: This is madness. He’s just peddling a bunch of easy answers.
Carl: And how!
Here’s an interesting way to ensure the feedback from customers makes you look good: ask the right questions! After a frustrating experience with AT&T (short version: I switched to automatic bill payment, where they just suck the funds out of your account instead of having you actively make a payment…but when you switch over to that service, it takes some time to kick in, so your next bill won’t get paid – they don’t tell you that, in fact the website indicates that your next bill will be paid automatically, and meanwhile, they remove all the one-click “make a payment” functions from your online account, so you are in limbo where you need to write a check or something once they start nagging you for the missing payment that you thought you’d already made) they sent a customer satisfaction survey (“AT&T Email Support Survey”) that only asked me to rate the service I received against my expectations. It was the familiar Likert scale
survey, where the rankings were
Nicely done! Who expects good support from a phone company? Not me. But “just as expected” sounds more contented than pessimistic. They could deliver consistently crappy service, but as long as they are within their brand perception of crappy service, everything is A-OK.
Text messaging seen as a culprit in event that took deadly turn is a tragic story but a ridiculous fear-mongering headline. The media loves to blame technology. A family had a party in a tough neighborhood and tried to control who came to the party. Kids told other kids about the event by SMS. The parents searched people who came to their house. One kid had a gun, and he was kicked out, he returned and shot the father to death. Seems like the shooter, and the gun are both culprits. Text-messaging is merely a technology and the SF Chron (a leading paper in a tech-centric community) should be embarrassed to be writing bullshit headlines like that.