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Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

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Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How do we scale that feeling that someone got a personal handwritten note” is really dystopian.

Very reminiscent of the movie Her, where the main character worked at a letter writing service you could pay someone to write thoughtful letters to family and friends.

In Japan you can rent a family.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#43

Fucking marketers just want to destroy all sincerity in the world.

It is a matter of semiotics.

At one point you need to scale, and you realise you can just manipulate symbols easier. They might at one point have come from sincerity, but industrial scale trumples all.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#45

Fucking marketers just want to destroy all sincerity in the world.

Every time I read more about marketing (for my business) it enrages me more.

I basically don't use twitter, but I find myself on the platform in rants about how exploitive and manipulative some people are willing to be.

There is one company that targets vunerable people with their relatively affordable Veblen goods to make them feel socially insecure if they buy an Android instead. It's so obvious when you read about it, but it's masked in edgy advertising.

Reading about a company's marketing strategy is probably not good for my health.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How do we scale that feeling that someone got a personal handwritten note” is really dystopian.

Alternatively, "a scalable way to bring a little bit of joy to many people" is actually nice & good.

The reason it brings joy is because they think it's from a human. If they knew it wasn't it wouldn't bring joy.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#47

There was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency. https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...

The real down-side to this, as with deepfakes, I think, is not that it makes fake things look real, but that it makes all real things possibly fake.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#48

Fucking marketers just want to destroy all sincerity in the world.

Another interpretation would be that they are just uncovering the fact that behind many nice and kind behaviours lie some very selfish interests.

In every human interaction you can perceive the battle over power, social status and personal interests. It's just the way it is. Some people can see it, others not or just don't want to.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, "a scalable way to bring a little bit of joy to many people" is actually nice & good.

It's not "bringing joy", it's emotional manipulation. Intent matters. This isn't any better than MLM people pretending to be your friend in order to sell you tupperware. In a single naive interaction, sure, it may bring joy. But repeated at scale throughout society, it creates distrust by being insincere and devalues sincere expressions of kindness, harming everyone.

That’s the harm - you’re taking things the body and brain are used to and simulating them to elicit the response you want.

I’m sure a company could develop an AI advanced enough to imitate a cute employee who is really into you when you have an issue - and use that to encourage you to spend way more because “they love you”.

Hell, I bet you could offer “CEO on HackerNews” as a marketing service - keep an eye on posts involving your company and impersonate the CEO as necessary- and of course be able to actually call him in if needed. Probably already being done …

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How do we scale that feeling that someone got a personal handwritten note” is really dystopian.

I would have preferred a video FaceTime call from the business owner or one of the partners anyway.

Let's see, we already have deep faked audio that can be trained to sound like anyone, deep faked video, and chat bots that can be trained to talk/write like anyone, so scaling this to millions of customers is not far off
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