A marketing tactic studied

[bellatrys]

I've been thinking a lot about the MINX mess, and how it was that that the professionals could get it so wrong and be so oblivious to how and why, when customers and potential customers were trying to tell them so loudly in so many ways for so long, and something somebody said that I saw in my dowsing which I need to find and cite helps encapuslate

Comments

[jonquil]

OMG those soaps are *beautiful*.

Another case would be the WB: they were attracting a strong female and over-30 audience, but they kept trying to make it attractive to a male under-30 audience, because that's where the advertisers were.

"We don't want this bird in our hands,

[bellatrys]

We want those much bigger ones over in yonder shrubbery!"

OH NOES NOW WE HAS NO BURDZ AT ALL, WOE IS US - STOOPIT BURDZ. WE DINT WANT UR OLD FEATHERZ ANYHOO!

--Just how old *is* that proverb, anyway?

Re: "We don't want this bird in our hands,

[fridgepunk]

OH NOES NOW WE HAS NO BURDZ AT ALL, WOE IS US - STOOPIT BURDZ. WE DINT WANT UR OLD FEATHERZ ANYHOO!

OMG Cats! They're giant hairless talking cats!

It all makes sense now.

Cousins of Catbert, no doubt

[bellatrys]

Of course, Dilbert had the marketing guys drinking ambrosia and frolicking in a meadow full of unicorns to explain their lack of contact with what the rest of the company knew as "reality," so not really that far off either.

It all makes way much more sense than the idea of "we will throw away the stinky customers we got in hopes of attracting a higher grade and larger numbers of customers we don't got," still!

Re: Cousins of Catbert, no doubt

[fridgepunk]

I was thinking more in terms of the way a cat, upon having let a mouse or bird get away during its torture session, pretends that that was what it meant to do all along.

Because it very much seems like, if there's a business, and it's not failing but it's not succeeding exactly, then the chance of the people running the buiness then doing something really stupid that runs the business into the ground seems almost to equal exactly 1 - as though the people in charge are primarily working to fail in a way that is "proactive", or whatever, enough that they don't have to deal with all the other business men laughing at them for not succeeding in some impossibly mythic way.

That's why Catbert is the HR director

[bellatrys]

Playing with people, see - but as far as the pretending We meant to all along/that DID NOT HAPPEN/you did NOT see me fall off the windowsill! yeah, institutional pride after gross stupidity isn't just limited to the editors of minor online SF journals...