Where the heck did the service go?

Just stopped in Kit's Cameras to pick up a packet of lens cleaning paper. Not a hello or a greeting, just a "be with you in a minute" from a clerk on the phone. Surly. Film processing person asks can they help, I ask for paper. She gets paper, seems amazed that that's all I want. Dumps my change in my hand (I count it out, since she didn't bother). Not a thanks, not anything acknowledging that an economic transaction has just occured that was completely optional on my part and enriched them to some tiny extent.

Sure, they're just minimum-wage employees. They don't get stock, profit sharing, incentives for quality, nada. They just get fired if I complain.

It's only interesting because this is becoming the norm, not the exception. Every touchpoint to every customer is marketing and sales. How are you doing?

Big changes coming to major ISPs?

Heard this through the grapevine this morning: watch for big changes to email privileges among the major ISPs. Word is that they're going to restrict how many email messages you can send, when you can send them, etc., all in an attempt to restrict spamming. Now if all those Chinese servers would just follow the same rules, we'd be off the hook.

PeeKay the Wonder Car. This M3 Lightweight is a delight to drive. This is the Rose Cup weekend, June 2000. This was the last race I ran in PeeKay, which has been sitting in my garage ever since. Oh, the woes of working too much! 

Disorientation

I was in one of those underground parking lots this morning, trying to find my car. This happens to me a lot. Some of these lots are arranged fairly logically, others kind of wind around in and out with weird angles and such. I get totally disoriented.

Not everybody is this way. Some people (like my son Kevin) could find their way out the Maze of the Minotaur. But not me.

Disorientation, among other things, is a loss of context. It means that you don't know where you are relative to the big picture. Wandering around in this mess, I realized this is what some web sites are like: mazes. And so are other marketing communications.

Once you're in, you quickly get disoriented and lose context. The answer, of course, is to provide lots of signposts, plenty of context, and places where people can pop out into the open and see where they've been and what's ahead.

Think about your marcomm and ask yourself how likely people are to get disoriented once they're in your "maze."

Cheers

Chicane at the back side of Portland Int'l Raceway, Formula Mazda. This is a VERY fast turn. There's no room for a screwup. The lateral G-forces in the Mazda are enough that I can't hold my head up without pain, so I lean it against the roll hoop. "No pain, no gain:" in the Mazda, if it doesn't make your neck ache, you went too slow. 

Welcome to the Workpump blog

Thanks for taking a look at this. Blogging is a new thing to me, but it will let me share thoughts with my friends around the world quickly and simply. I hope to use this as a place to talk about marketing and selling tools and solutions, both high tech (like software and hardware) and also "mundane" industries not in high tech. I may talk about consumer and commodity marketing from time to time as well, too.