Food fight!(rant about marketing people)

[Brett Dikeman]

At 7:13 PM +0100 4/7/01, quk at isham-research.freeserve.co.uk wrote:

>http://www.quattroownersclub.com ?

Seems it requires Flash to be installed.

Well, so I went and installed flash.  Apparently, the site's "does 
the user have Flash installed" detector is too stupid to recognize a 
Macintosh running Internet Explorer and Flash.

If there are any web designers or marketing people on the list, heed 
this call.  Nothing irritates the crap out of users like making them 
install something to view your site.  They won't, unless they 
-really- want to go to your site, at which point, you might as well 
throw in blink tags, gaudy colored text/backgrounds, animated gifs, 
etc.

   The rest will simply go to a competitor's site.  It's a lesson I 
tried to teach the ditzy director of marketing at the last company I 
worked for, and she just didn't get it.  Just like her "email 
blasts", which I told her she couldn't do until she fixed the 
headers("but then my staff will get flooded with complaints."  "Think 
about what you just said very hard, Ms. Fahey."  Finally, when our 
ISP contacted us about the complaints, I went to the President, 
pointed to the clause in our contract which prohibited spam, and she 
was forced to relent and adopt an op-out field in the DB, proper 
headers, etc.) What was particularly stunning was that she was the 
loudest complainer about all the spam she got every day.  Phhbt.

   It amazes me how people so concerned about image just DON'T GET IT 
when it comes to spam, annoying plugins, etc.  You can argue with 
them until you're blue in the face about how they're alienating 
customers left and right, but they see a 20 count increase in 
per-unit sales that week and say "it worked."  Then they'll spend 
hours going over a press release to make sure it's got the right 
spin, to the point that people scan the thing in 5 seconds because 
they know there's nothing worthwhile or interesting.  Too much 
thought and effort in one area, none in another...

B