Say it ain’t so, Jerry!
Well, now it’s official. Bad marketing, disrespectful marketing, organizational deadend marketing is officially entrenched, probably never to be extracted.
I just got my mailed copy of the Grateful Dead Almanac, a catalog of the best and greatest new Dead stuff. This is always an expensive moment for me. As always, I followed the links and took out the credit card.
First stop was THE DEAD – Official Concert Recording Series. Neat idea. After buying a few, I get to the checkout, and the little tiny fine print says, “Click here to opt out of mailings from OCRS”. Huh? Opt out, guys, is spam. The notice is designed to be missed. The goal is to trick people into getting mail they don’t want to get. Sigh.
Then, it’s over to gdstore.com to buy the new Dicks Picks album, which is raved about in the Almanac. It’s not there.
So I call.
Then I get the recording that, “Due to heavy call volume…” Have you ever called a company and heard the truth? “Due to budget priorities, we decided it was cheaper to have you wait on hold for a few minutes than it was to hire more operators…”
Anyway, after a few minutes, a nice guy answered and said, “Are you calling to buy Dicks Picks #30?” I responded in the affirmative. And then he said this (I’m not making this up):
“We won’t have it until tomorrow, and until we have it, I can’t take your order.”
Yes, that’s what he meant. I checked.
Does this sound like your organization? Are the systems so out of control that we’ve forgotten how to let one person do business with another person? This poor guy is spending his whole day telling thousands of people with money to spend to go away. This organization spent a fortune on stamps and printing for the Almanac, designed (in part) to sell Dicks Picks 30, but they can’t figure out how to take the orders that come in.
Sigh.
Well, (at least for now) they’re not trying to sell me Vi*gra, debt reduction services or mini RC race cars.