There’s really nothing more irritating than lazy marketing. It’s when a marketer expects you to just hand over your money to them. The marketer is behaving lazily — they don’t invest their time researching and developing a compelling offer that drives consumers to purchase the product/service.
So imagine my frustration when a lazy marketing email arrived in my inbox from Netflix, a company that I’m a big fan of and I’ve written about in the past. It was a win-back offer asking me to renew my recently cancelled subscription. I had closed my account when Netflix announced that their 1-DVD rental/unlimited streaming service was increasing from about $10 to $16 per month earlier this year. Actually, I considered subscribing only to their streaming service but felt that the value wasn’t there at the $7.99 per month price point. While I am a believer that streaming media is the wave of the future, I felt that the Netflix library (or anyone else’s these days) is a bit anemic. So shortly after shutting it down, the win-back emails started rolling in and while I ignored the first one or two, I started to notice a surprising pattern.
Read more…
I am quickly learning that I can’t live without my Apple.
I recently broke down and purchased an iPhone 3GS . I resisted to become enslaved to another electronic leash. For those that don’t know what I mean, it is the nickname for the BlackBerry that I carried for almost two years in my prior job. I saw it as a leash because of the blinking red light. For the uninitiated, it is the indicator light on a BlackBerry for new email messages. Like many others hip carrying users, I initially fell in love with my BlackBerry device because it allowed me to peak at my inbox. The pain of spending 5 minutes waiting on my laptop to reawaken from standby, log into the corporate network and fire up Outlook went away with a BlackBerry. But before I knew it, I was trained like Pavlov’s dog to look for the blinking red light. It was a vice that I was glad to be rid of for good, or so I thought.
As I debated the purchase, I wondered if my crackberry habit of checking my email would resurface. I knew that I was somewhat safe because Apple didn’t put an indicator at the top of their iPhone. Also, the iPhone has an option to turn off the sounds when a new message arrives in the inbox. It was amazing how I could be in control — I could set aside time to look at emails instead of stopping whatever it is that i was doing and rushing to my device to look who wrote me or what blew up (if there’s an emergency, they can always call!).
So at this point, I’m only a few days into this “experiment” but I’m already realizing why so many people are fans of the Apple brand. It managed to be totally focused on serving consumers like me.
