We Have Your Money Already Marketing

Posted on 05.04.06. Tagged with , , , , , All

Ever get the feeling that companies care more about recruiting new customers than keeping old ones? I would like to propose a term for positive marketing that, in an effort to recruit new customers, makes current customers feel worse. It's called "WHYMA"(We Have Your Money Already).

Take the recent Cingular commercials about dropped calls. They brag about having the network with the least dropped calls. This really irks me.

I know cell phone towers can get overloaded. I know dropped calls happen. I know service completely goes out and is so bad it gets written up in The Alligator (student newspaper in Gainesville). I understand that. I don't expect perfection. What I don't like is seeing commercials bragging about how good Cingular is. It's not comforting, it's not warm and fuzzy. All it does is remind me of how bad Cingular can be.

Same thing with the new Get A Mac ads bragging about how easy and great and perfect Macs are (besides the fact that the ads are pretty damn entertaining).

I love my powerbook. I love my work powerbook. I love OSX. I also like my HP Desktop. What I don't like is seeing commercials bragging about how perfect macs are. Do you know how often Safari crashes for me? Too often. Do you know that my PC also connects and finds my digital camera just fine. And that installing Norton Antivirus once lets me never worry about viruses again.

Last month I was not bitter about Cingular. I wasn't bitter about my Safari crashing once in awhile. Nothing and nobody is perfect. But please stop running commercials that just remind me of how imperfect your company is.

8 Comments

Mark
03:07 PM on 05.04.06

I quite agree. My crash buddy on my Mac seems to be System Preferences, which beachballs quite often and takes the Dock with it, oddly enough. It always comes back, though.

As for Safari, um, try Camino -- you really might like it. I haven't touched Safari since the first day, when I used it to download Camino. :)

kit
10:49 PM on 05.04.06

I'm pretty happy with Cingular and all the Macs in my life, but those ads really just piss me off. One of the things I used to like about Apple was the moral highground the company always took (in my head). Instead of smear ads, they merely talked up their own features. But this...no. Disillusionment is setting in.

Chirag
12:48 AM on 05.05.06

Ya there's a reason why Cingular has the least # of dropped calls - You can't drop a call when you don't get signal! And soon it'll be AT&T wireless again. *sigh*

Sam
08:41 AM on 05.05.06

Bragging in advertisements about how virus-proof your OS is is like wrtiing a peronal invitation to ever hacker out there to atack your OS.
Companies like Redhat and Apple seem to forget that the only reason thir OS's don't get many virus attacks is because they have a cummulative 5% market share. If that went up to 40% they'd have just as many virus problems as Windows.

Spookyu
09:25 PM on 05.15.06

Hmmm, I think they went in the wrong direction. Really, all they did was piss the PC users (and a few Mac/PC users) off. Maybe if they would have went in the direction of "Hey, our new computers can ALSO run xp!" (this would require them to invest more time and effort in that) well, they could expand there customer base in a different way. I'm actually a PC user (I can't freaking stand not being able to right click, among other things) but maybe if there was a Mac that could run OSX and XP (both fully functional) I would seriously consider buying a Mac. But what do I know?

Taylor
09:26 AM on 05.16.06
The Author

Just a side note Spookyu, if you get a normal mouse you can right click in OSX.

Adski
02:36 AM on 05.27.06

"Ever get the feeling that companies care more about recruiting new customers than keeping old ones?"

I get that feeling about my girlfriends. I just wish I would stop running into them cause it reminds me of how imperfect their company was.

Ha!

Lori
03:48 PM on 06.18.06

Hah! Cingular and their Dropped Calls...

I use to not have problems, but with the last phone
Just in one night, I had over 8 dropped calls.
It was annoying to my boyfriend and I to the point
that It was part of an Argument. A silly Argument.
But at least with our emails and recent Convos using
SKYPE... we finally manage to come to some conclusions
and I'm still tempted to call Cingular and complain.
Let them hear the buzzing when the call isn't dropped.
It's sad when you have to go from a service that You
Pay dearly for... to a service online that's free.


Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?


Your email address will not be made public. Be courteous and try not to hurt my feelings.