I hope to explain why I am asking this question in a follow-up post, but since I am scrambling about in preparation for Aunt B’s parents to arrive here, I’ll just throw this out there in case any corporate types stumble across my site after Googling coyote skins or something. I’ll admit that I hate corporations and publicly owned companies pretty much across the board, and I will further admit that I am not well suited to work for one, so if you can answer this for me, I’d be eternally grateful:
Why is it that you spend millions of dollars and countless man-hours trying to attract my business, only to treat me so badly once you do? How does it fit in your business model to take full page ads out, run TV spots during prime time, bombard the internet, and send me direct mail, and then make sure that my experience with you all but guarantees that I will never be back?
(I realize that there is no way to answer this without more context, so let me give one example, in fact one that is near and dear to my heart. Also, this is in part motivated by a recent experience at a well known hotel chain, but for now, lets use the car dealership as an example.)
I used to run large ads in a very expensive car market. 30 thousand dollars wasn’t unusual. This is on top of billboards, and of course a very expensive direct mail and internet ad campaign. In the car business, there is no way to track a referral source accurately, not even when it is internet driven. Perhaps especially when it is internet driven. But my point is that there is no way we didn’t lose money week in and week out on that advertising, particularly print advertising.
Then, when potential customers show up, we employed the same tired old school techniques that worked when there was but one choice per town, and your average buyer couldn’t pull up the damn invoice on his computer. We wouldn’t answer a direct question, had little or no product knowledge, and the minute we knew you were not ready to sign up that day, we just about lost all interest.
Anyway, thats it.
