I got a postcard from American Express today, telling me that all I need to do to is call a toll free number and they will give me double “points” on all my gas and grocery purchases. (Points can be turned into miles on airlines and that sort of thing.) But rather than call the number, I threw the postcard away.
Why? Because I don’t trust American Express. They fooled me a bunch of times on things, and I gave up on them.
For instance, they once sent a long letter explaining that they were giving me a free, really nice, leather-bound calendar. Then, in the tiniest of print on the back of the envelope in a place I really wasn’t supposed to look, they informed me that if I accepted the free gift, I would receive another calendar every year for something like forty dollars, and that to cancel I would need to send a letter to a special address.
Another time, they sent me a letter explaining that I had been subscribed as I requested (which I hadn’t) in some type of revolving credit account. I didn’t even understand what the credit account was. The letter was signed (stamped) by a head of customer care who offered to answer any questions I might have. All I had to do was call him at the number provided. I did, twice. Waited 45 minutes each time, and gave up. I sent a letter addressed to him instead, to the address on the envelope, kindly asking for any information about what I was enrolled in. Never heard back.
There are a bunch more, but you get the point. I signed up with American Express when I was traveling a lot, earning a lot, and felt I had the two hundred bucks to spare for access to all the airport lounges. Now, I don’t.
Of course, I wouldn’t have thought to have this conversation with myself after a dozen or more years “membership” had American Express not foolishly exploited their real relationship with me to sell silly things like calendars, and to do so in a shady manner. Or kept sending me letters that looked like bills just to get me to open them, when they were actually offers for other unrelated products. It’s not nice to leverage a relationship in that way.
There’s a lesson in this for businesses of all kinds: do really shitty things and set your consumers free.
Every time I speak, people ask me about new media and money – namely, how to make money through the internet. And they always bring up Rupert Murdoch. He wouldn’t have bought the Wall Street Journal if he didn’t think there was money in it, right?
Right, but wrong. There’s money for Murdoch in buying the Journal, but not the money you’re thinking about. What Murdoch wants is a respectable business brand. The WSJ is that. It was actually a profitable online business, too – their articles were valuable enough for people to pay real money to access them.
But that’s not the money Murdoch wants. Murdoch wants to spend the WSJ’s credibility on two very different things. First, he wants an international news brand for TV and the Internet. Fox is too O’Reilly-polluted to serve as a seemingly neutral source of authoritative financial news. WSJ has a good decade of international branding left in it before it would be totally watered down through overuse.
Second, the WSJ has enough credibility to influence markets. And that’s the real game being played here. The last of the credible top-down media companies will be employed in the continuing public relations strategy for deregulation, the stock market pyramid, or whatever else is in its owners’ interests. As people learn to look at bottom-up media for the credibility that top-down conglomerate-owned media must by definition lack, things will change again. This time for the better.
The most gratifying thing for a writer or thinker is to see other people implement his ideas – and in ways he didn’t imagine himself. Here’s a post on MediaEnvironment, applying Get Back in the Box to Treehuggers:
Since this week we’ll be looking at strategic communication in the context of environmental media and business, I thought I’d spend this post looking at these forces through the prism of a wonderful book called Get Back in the Box by noted writer, lecturer, theorist Douglas Rushkoff of NYU. The main premise of the book is that business is so obsessed with out-of-the-box thinking and increasingly interruptive marketing that they have become divorced from what Rushkoff calls their “core competencies.” In other words, they don’t actually do the thing they do. Instead of pouring money into research and development companies divert funds to strategic campaigns or hire outside consultants to reimagine their enterprise rather than actually trying to make something good and useful – something that has value and solves real needs. In terms of environmental media, treehugger seems to be a textbook example of an online mediaspace that embodies the power of what Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Treehugger has been wildly successful because it offers a place where passionately involved members can go to pursue a common interest. Treehugger content itself, to use Rushkoff’s words, is a “medium for interaction.” Treehugger marketing and strategic communication may have helped their awareness level, but it was Treehugger’s own competency as a marketplace for interaction, education, and subtle activism that made it valuable to people. Treehugger is a good website and that’s why people visit it. That seems naively simple, but it’s a surprisingly elusive concept for many in business to grasp.
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