“Hey, you really need this great (insert ADSL or Foxtel or ADSL2 etc) offer. Act now and it’s yours for no setup/installation fee…”

You get excited about it and then, WHAM! Not available in your area.

A variation on that theme is the door to door sales person -whom you inform will not get the sale because you don’t have the credit rating for it- who has to call you back a few days later to tell you that your application has been unsuccessful. If they’d listened you would have saved all involved some time and effort.

By far the worst one though comes from the other side of the fence. I used to work for Foxtel years ago (yes, I was one of the pests that would annoy you right on dinner time) and there were a few times that I signed someone up only to have the technician turn up and tell them that the job couldn’t be completed. At this point you would have the money you made from that sale raked back out of your next pay and usually an irate customer ranting at you down the phone in obvious dissapointment.

Oh, and by the way, sometimes the “idiocy” is thrust upon you by the company you work for with the lies they tell you, which are then passed on to you prospective customers.

Also, having purchased the Web Business Design Kit for hundreds of US dollars I wasn’t too thrilled to have to spend hundreds of dollars again for the 2.0 release. So I didn’t. An upgrade pack containing the only new material for a representative cost would have had me punching my credit card numbers in immediately.

Communication in the virtual world is way too often “one way traffic”, companies doing a lot of talking but zero listening, capitalism is in danger of necking itself!

Having owned and registered Filemaker Pro 6,7 and 9 I am astonished to receive numerous offers of “free tutorials” only do be lead to 404s or dead links, etc.

I feel that a simple respond link with options to enlighten the junk-mail sender with the knowledge of how much they are shitting you, e.g. 1. Thanks for the offer but I have already purchased it from another vendor, 2. Hey, you arseholes sold the same thing to me last week for double the price, where’s my refund, 3. I don’t like junk-mail, don’t shit me again! The responses would be one way of convincing those at the helm to spend a bit more to ensure the faux pars do not occur.

Thanks for the post again

Consider the article titled “The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques - PDF Only.”

I click the link and on that page is a link titled “Download Complete Book.”

Now, when I surf, I like to right-click and open the link in a new window. Many people do this, for varying reasons. But, when I right-click this link Firefox notifies me that a pop-up has been blocked.

I don’t want to allow any web site unrestricted rights so I don’t ‘allow pop-ups from http://www.sitepoint.com.’;

My only other real choice, forced on me by the web design, is to left-click the link and lose the current page.

This, too is marketing, and in my ‘cost/benefit’ equation is a high cost I pay for visiting such a site.

Seriously, who looks forward to the daily spam (in the email inbox or in the snail mailbox), the telemarketing phone call or the door to door salesman? We all HATE it, many people so vehemently that they’ll actually stop buying a product made by a company who uses the most obnoxious of these techniques (telemarketing and door-to-door). You have to wonder how much legitimacy you sacrifice and how many potential customers you drive away by getting in their face and filling up their mailbox with junk.

We should be looking for ways to reach people and raise product awareness which don’t annoy them or leave them with a bad taste in their mouth and a feeling like they got pressured or suckered after the sale. Unfortunately high pressure sales and blatant lying are strongly associated with direct marketing; the whole thing just oozes dishonesty. There has to be a better way, start blogging on that!

Maybe I’m in the wrong industry. :)

- Can you do that little change? I forgot to tell you…

>:(

I’ll agree that showing a potential customer that you offer a product at a lower price than they may have purchased may be “rubbing [their] noses in it,” as you put it. However (and to continue on your analogy) why do you rub a dog’s nose in it? So they won’t do it again, of course! By showing a customer that they’ve made a mistake going somewhere else, the customer will begin to look to you for future and similar purchases. If the customer had no idea you had the same product for a lower price, why would they even bother looking at you in the future unless you give them the reason. People learn from their mistakes, but only if you show them they have made a mistake.