I went to pick up my shirts from a new dry cleaner today.
It’s just across the street from my house, so very convenient, and it looked like the kind of dry cleaner that takes good care of your clothes. (One I went to when I first came to Vancouver used to staple their claim tickets to the bottom of my shirts. Staple!)
So I’d dropped off my clothes last week, told the fellow no hurry, and then forgotten about it for a day or two, so today was pickup day.
After I’d paid for the shirts, he looks at me and asks, “Do you use deodorant?”
Uh, yeah, why?
“Well, here sir,”—and he offers me this free sample of deodorant, Gillette clinical strength somethingorother.
Free sample, he said. He’d been contacted by Gillette and had a bunch of these to give away to his “best customers.”
Now, I don’t know if he decided while washing my clothes that I was in sore and dire need of this particular product, or if the fact that I was spending $100 on dry cleaning—it has been months since I’ve taken any in, so I had quite a pile built up by Susie and I—meant I was in the non-wanting-to-smell demographic.
But overall, I think it’s a risky proposition to be telling your new clients that they, in a nutshell, stink.
“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)