Some things I just don’t trust
May 25, 2007
Given that it’s the year 2007, you’d think companies would’ve cottoned on to a few cliched, cheesy, unbelievable and outright silly things that they shouldn’t try to market themselves with. I guess not. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels turned off by a company which uses one or more of these techniques:
- Taglines like Your main supplier of … or Your experts in …. Seriously, I’ve not heard about you before. You’re not my anything.
- Anything involving an explamation mark.
- Anything involving more than one explamation mark.
- Anything involving an exclamation mark and a question mark next to each other.
- Other grammatical atrocities, such as using numbers as phonetic replacements for words, or trying to spell things phonetically. JooToobe anyone?
- Pictures of attractive women with headsets waiting to take your call. Call centre operators are, by and large, not very attractive, and in any event I wouldn’t be able to see them. This argument counts doubly for the kind of companies that advertise exclusively in London telephone booths.
- Other images which were obviously purchased as stock photos.
- Pseudo-diversity. I used to work for someone who had a stock photo of a black hand shaking a white one. They also had one black employee. It wasn’t his hand.
- Anyone who insists on getting an email address (or worse, a contact number) before possibly divulging the price of something.
- Gyms.
- Over-use of superlatives or claims to being a silver bullet for whatever problem. I would come up with an example, but the most superb example I know of comes from Tom Wait’s Step Right Up.
- Websites which look like this. Bonus for the dancing robot though.
- Websites which don’t work in Firefox and/or Safari. “But most of the world uses Internet Explorer” is just a pathetic excuse these days.
- Companies or products which attempt to speak to customers in the first person. “Hi, I’m your friendly supplier of …” or “let me give you a hand with that”. The UK tax return is like that, and it’s damned irritating. Of course, I wouldn’t trust the taxman anyway.
Oh well. Enough procrastination for a while, back to work.
I think that cluttered website example is brilliant – I love it!!? It conveys far more information on one screen than any I have ever seen before. And I’m sure trying to fit them all together nicely without overlaps or white space keeps the webmaster amused.
The idea of having a pyramid one can proudly say they sit on top of is still seen as a major marketing argument. Specifying the details of that pyramid is what makes the whole thing funny (e.g. “the premier supplier of stainless washers of type B in town”). People need to be first, whatever first of what. I even heard a university principal a couple of years ago claim his new stadium was the best in North America. Given the university is a small one, I always wondered what the conditions were (details of the pyramid) to make his assertion true, like the best in “middle-sized poorly-funded eastern North American danish speaking universities” or what aspect of the stadium made it the best, like a revolutionary temperature stabilization control for showers
. The craze for competitiveness and need to push things down “consumers” throats (i.e. convince them) will lead to those atrocities, sadly.
A late comment :
I don’t trust sites where time dependent information doesn’t even show a date. How are you to believe model X of this company’s camera is now discontinued if don’t even know *when* the information that appear on the page was created or last updated ??
Makes me mad …
P.S. Martin : why didn’t you upload your former WordPress posts to your new Plone 3 site ?