Customers? Gee, who needs them anyway!

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Customers? Gee, who needs them anyway!

© Copyright Frank D. Kanu 2000-2008

In the late 80’s a manager from this really big computer company told me that their company is so big that they could stay busy with their bureaucracy for two years without ever serving a customer. Busy with themselves - two years no customer. Ancient history?

You wish!

Check this story from Perry Marshal:

There was only *one* part of the X10 seminar that wasn’t received with tremendous enthusiasm, and that was Overture.

The gales of laughter and the stares of total disbelief were priceless. (Overture, Google’s rival search engine in the Pay Per Click game, powers Yahoo, MSN and many other search engine. Originally GoTo.com, they pioneered the PPC concept which has totally revolutionized the web.)

Overture sent a couple of representatives to the seminar to give a presentation, and things started going downhill when a woman who’s relatively new to this stuff asked a rather innocent question:

Attendee: ‘Let’s say my business does window screen repair and there’s suddenly a hailstorm in Sydney, and I want to get on the web right away and advertise that I repair hail-damaged windows. How long does it take before my ad appears?’

Overture: ‘Why would you want to do that?’

Attendee: ‘Because I’d like people to come to my website right away and have me fix their screens because of the hailstorm.’

Overture: ‘But that’s not what you do; you just fix screens. Your business isn’t about hailstorms.’

Attendee: ‘Yes it is! And if there was suddenly a hailstorm, I’d like them to find my website right away and ring me up.’

Overture: ‘But if your website doesn’t have any pages about hailstorms, we can’t approve your ad. Your website would have to be about wind screen damage from hailstorms, because we have very stringent relevancy requirements so that people who search get only the best results.’

Attendee: ‘So if I put up a page about hail storm damage repair, how long does it take for my ad to show up?’

Overture: ‘3-7 days.’

Attendee: ‘3-7 days??? Whatever for? People want to fix hail damaged windows today, not 7 days from now.’

Overture: ‘That’s why it’s really important to already be advertising with Overture, even if your bids are really small, so that if something like this happens, you can increase your bids and become more visible, which only takes 2 minutes. We only charge you a minimum of $25 per month. Otherwise your ads would need to be approved by our content editors, which takes 3-7 days.’

Attendee: ‘OK, so let’s say my ads are already running and I just want to change them to say I repair hail damage, how long would that take?’

Overture: ‘Why would you want to do that? Your ads already say that you repair windows.’

Attendee: ‘Because if a hailstorm just happened, and people would be thinking about hail damage.’

Overture: ‘Why would you want to do that?’

Attendee: ‘Because we’re marketers!’

Overture: ‘You need to understand, we have a very stringent editorial process to make sure that only ads that meet our 80 pages of content requirements are approved, and people who search only see the most relevant possible listings from our advertisers.’

And so it went. ‘Overture, we want your service to be instantaneous, not take 3-7 days.’

‘Oh no, Mr. Customer, our editors know better than you and we’re not going to let your ads show up right away.’