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Stop Ruining It

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Re: Stop Ruining It

#11

Post by rileymat2 »

tardedmeme wrote: post #8
Hugsbox wrote: post #6

> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…

According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/pg-says-cut-digital...

> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.

>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#12

Post by FinnLobsien »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #2

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. so…

I think it depends on what exactly happened.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#14

Post by JackFr »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #9

As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust. I've seen this pattern a bunch: 1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insigh…

Path to X happiness:

- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.

- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".

Re: Stop Ruining It

#15

Post by fifticon »

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

Re: Stop Ruining It

#16

Post by JohnFen »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #12
dijksterhuis wrote: post #2

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. so…

I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wro…

> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#17

Post by b112 »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #12
dijksterhuis wrote: post #2

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. so…

I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wro…

Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#18

Post by b112 »

JohnFen wrote: post #16
FinnLobsien wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wro…

> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#19

Post by jollyllama »

fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI

Re: Stop Ruining It

#20

Post by Hugsbox »

hootz wrote: post #10
Hugsbox wrote: post #6

> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…

I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.

I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
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