Marketing shoots its own foot.
Had a couple of odd experiences last night:
First, out a dinner with some friends and these women start walking through the restaurant carrying signs.
Turns out they’re “models” hired by a few of the other fashion retailers in the mall. During my 1-1/2 hour dinner, they came by 3 different times with different outfits and different signs. I was appalled - no one else gave it a second thought. Are we so numb when it comes to advertising that we’ll accept its intrusion into any environment? For me, I’ll never set foot in that place again. A restaurateur who shows that lack of respect for my overall experience shouldn’t be rewarded IMO. I realise times are tough but that’s no reason to punish paying customers.
As I was leaving, I opened up my iPhone to see that I suddenly had over 150 unread messages. Opening up my inbox I found 70+ copies of an email from new startup predictor service YouNoodle.
I had registered for the beta of their service after reading about them on Techcrunch. Basically, they’ll compute a valuation for your startup in 3 years based on a host of quite sensitive information about funding, partners, business model, industry and so on.
Not only did they spam me 70+ times to tell me that I could now use their service - they also cc’d everyone else who had registered on the same email chain! This generated an equally long stream of replies to all which, while interesting, further clogged up my email.
They never emailed to apologise, except to people who’d emailed them directly and it also doesn’t appear that they’ve issued any other kinds of statements either.
They now have absolutely no chance of getting personal information about my company or anyone else’s company from me. If this is an example of how they treat personal information and privacy they’re DOA. It’s an interesting business/service but it’s clearly an excuse to harvest valuable data. They know that, I know that and the only thing that makes me OK with it is them not screwing around or being careless with that data.
Both of these are examples of “marketing” that completely undermines the core business. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is that rare. People lose track of what business they’re really in and do stupid stuff that negates all the hard work they’ve put in elsewhere.