Just a Smidge: marketing

Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Caught in a Marketing Trap

They got me. I'm the sucker.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." I am a fan of his, because I went to Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School in the ‘80s, where I also learned he coined the phrases, "Gag me with a spoon,” “Take a chill pill,” “Bros before hoes," and “Party hearty with Bacardi.” If you don’t believe me, you can check my yearbooks.

Anyway, back to me being a sucker. There I was one day, about three weeks ago, mindlessly spiraling down the Facebook rabbit hole when I saw it. A better mousetrap.

Literally. It was an ad for an actual mousetrap.

The design was brilliant. Just a simple plastic lid that you pop onto the top of a five-gallon bucket. The lid came with a little plastic ramp the mice would happily climb to get to the delicious peanut butter I would spread liberally on the underside of the little raised roof in the middle of the lid. They would scamper toward the free meal only to find… what’s this? I foolishly walked out onto an ingenious trap door that was cleverly hidden under the little raised roof, and now I find myself in the bottom of this five-gallon bucket, unable to get out. Woe is me!

The real-life footage in the ad was amazing. A black and white time-lapse video from inside a barn showing mouse after hungry mouse falling victim to the trap door prank. I saw so many mice fall into the bucket in the short video that I was amazed they hadn’t figured out how to make a mouse cheerleader pyramid to get back out.

It was incredible! And so simple.

I immediately beat an internet path to their virtual door and bought one from the random Chinese website linked in the ad. It was a little over $20, and I waited patiently for it for about an hour before I went to Amazon and found the same ones from a different Chinese mousetrap conglomerate that were two for $20 and would arrive tomorrow.

I bought those, too. I mean, I have three buckets, and if one amazing new mousetrap is good, three will be phenomenal.

Well… three weeks, $40, and two operational, peanut butter-baited mousetraps later, I have captured exactly zero rodents of any kind. I have one in the garage and one in the backyard by the shed, and I can honestly tell you, they work as well indoors as they do outdoors.

Someone (not P.T. Barnum) once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I have proven that to be true recently.

And speaking of that old phrase, I just happen to be having a special right now on the most amazing new trap door-style mousetraps. Check out the video! They’re ingenious! Hurry though, because they’re moving fast. I only have three left in stock.

They’re only $40 each!

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, December 7, 2022

An Open Letter to Best Foods

Dear Best Foods,

I really want to thank you for providing me with a brand new life experience recently. I’m fifty now, so my new life experiences these days mostly revolve around a different joint becoming painful, pulling a new muscle getting up out of a low chair, or messages from my doctor about my colon.

But you provided me with a new and far less uncomfortable life experience the other day.

You mailed me a condiment.

I’m just writing to let you know that’s a really weird thing to do.

I received a plain white padded envelope in the mail, with absolutely no markings on it except my address and the return address, which was listed as “SOPOST, 14 Henderson Drive, West Caldwell, NJ.”

What is SOPOST? You guys are lucky I opened it. If it wasn’t Christmastime, I probably would have tossed it, but you never know what my wife has purchased this time of year. I sure as heck wasn’t going to be the one responsible for Grandma’s stocking coming up short on Christmas morning, so I looked inside.

Imagine my surprise to find one single fast-food-size packet of your new Spicy Mayonnaise Dressing hot-glued to a postcard with a picture of a chicken sandwich on it.

Look, I’m not going to lie to you – the chicken sandwich and fries pictured on the card look amazing. And from what I can tell from the photo, you seem to think your new Spicy Mayonnaise Dressing goes well as a sandwich spread and as a fry dipping sauce.

That may very well be true, but how am I supposed to tell? You sent me exactly 0.47 fluid ounces of your new sauce. I’m a full-grown man with three large and still growing teenage boys. None of us has ever used just one fast-food-size packet of any condiment on anything we’ve ever eaten.

I mean, I put four packets of hot sauce on each one of my Taco Bell crunchy tacos. My boys ask for an entire separate bag filled with Chick-fil-A sauce cups to go with their chicken and fries. Those things hold way more than 0.47 ounces, and they go through them all.

This is America, Best Foods, as you can tell by both the To: and From: addresses on your weird plain white padded envelope. We love our sauces here in America, and you should know that better than anyone. How are you expecting me to get excited about your amazing new spicy mayo when you send me basically one drop of it? I’m going to run out before I’m halfway through my first bite of chicken.

If you want to market your new sauce with free samples to a house full of American men, you’d best be sending us the 11.5-ounce bottle sitting next to the chicken sandwich in the picture. I mean, have you ever even seen a teenager eat? Suffice it to say, keep your hands and feet away from their mouths at all times. At the rate the food enters their bodies, I’m amazed they taste any of it. You have to have a lot of sauce on there to get any kind of reaction out of them.

And speaking of my boys and your marketing department – if you really want to sell this stuff, don’t send me a single packet all the way across the country in an unmarked envelope like a bunch of weirdos. Get with the times. Pay an influencer on YouTube or TikTok to rave about how amazing your sauce is. That’s how you market to kids, and they’re the ones inhaling all the sauces around here anyway.

You are welcome for the condiment-ary advice,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Be Best Life - Repost

A commissioner from the FCC is calling for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. If you are unfamiliar with TikTok (in other words, if you’re really old), chances are it’s the thing that your grandkids are staring at when they are staring at their phones. Which is all the time. Literally, right now. Look at them right now, and they will be watching a TikTok video.

TikTok is a video app where young people record themselves either dancing or hilariously getting “accidentally” hit with something by their friends, and then trillions and trillions of other young people watch those videos in a trance while drooling and forgetting to do their chores and homework.

The FCC has shown, however, that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese government, is illegally data mining off every phone it’s installed on. TikTok is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but rest assured, your teenager doesn’t care, so Apple and Google will keep offering it.

TikTok may be bad, but I’m here to tell you that not everything coming out of China is nefarious. I mean, the copywriting on Chinese products is bad, but it’s hilarious, and only harmful to the sales of those products. Actually, it has an outside chance of being harmful to you, I guess, if you happen to fall over laughing like I did when I got the SUPERSEALER for Christmas.

The SUPERSEALER is a crappy ninety-nine-cent as-seen-on-TV plastic bag sealer that is really hard to operate and works poorly. I could care less about the bag sealer. I am in love with the little cardboard box it came in.

The WORKWONDER SUPERSEALER is made in China by a Chinese company that obviously has two copywriters. One of these people has some background in using the English language. We’ll call him Bob. The other has to be the owner’s son, and after disappointing performances in many different departments, copywriter was the least harmful position his dad could think of to stick him. We’ll assume the owner’s name is Mr. Wang. Mr. Wang doesn’t know any English either. Bob is obviously terrified of Mr. Wang and won’t tell him that Son of Wang partied continuously for four years at the international university in Beijing and knows no English whatsoever.

In a few places on the box, Bob invites me to Just slide SUPERSEALER across bags to seal in freshness!

Son of Wang tells me, Relaxed onepulls, guarantees quality to retain freshness. Based on what we get from Son of Wang in his main paragraph, I guarantee Bob helped him with the last half of that sentence.

Here’s Bob’s effort on selling us on the amazing benefits of the SUPERSEALER:

Finally an inexpensive and easy way to perfectly reseal unused poutions of food. This amazing new SUPERSealer creates an airtight seal that locks in freshness.

You simply slids SUPERSealer along the edge of any bag and it’s sealed airtight. It’s that easy. You’ll not only save on storage bags, but you can save even more buying bulk at warehouse clubs. Just use your SUPERSealer to reseal any unused portions over and over again!

I never claimed that Bob was great. I just said he has some background in English. He’s not the best speller, but I do have to give him credit for using American sayings like, “locks in freshness,” and “it’s that easy.” That would suggest that he has a better than average grasp on American English than your standard WORKWONDER employee.

Here’s what Son of Wang had to offer us. I swear, I am not making any of this up, and keep in mind, folks, this is written on the SAME BOX as Bob’s paragraph.

Have sometimes been able to affect your state of mindbecause of a lot of situation such as damp , becomingmildewed , depraved , water leaking from in the dailylife, have used you feel very vexed , good under this , have had the convenient plastic bag of new model seal implement , have all have made stable , no matter howvexed your nonutility be. Collection such as all food , clothing and other articales of daily use , postage stamp, you have put plastic bag lining inside as long as with them , seal machine has taken form lightly with convenient adheaive tape of new model as soon as the fault , one have protection against the tide , mould proof, the herm etic sealing bag retaining freshness. Such is simple , the simplicity is comfortable, be best life!

After reading the box about a hundred times (and laughing out loud every single time), I have to assume this conversation took place at the WORKWONDERS office prior to printing the box:

“My dad wants you to proofread my copy, Bob. What do you think?”

“This is the most unintelligible thing anyone has ever written. What the hell, Wang?”

“My dad is the owner. I’ll have you fired.”

“Looks great. Let’s print that box!”

I mean, am I a little concerned that Communist China will eventually collapse the world’s digital economy by waging a cyber war against us with our own data? Sure I am, but at least Son of Wang provided my family our new motto: