the most inept marketing I have ever seen
I received a catalogue in the post, and it turned out there was something in it that I would like to buy. I sat down in front of the computer and looked for the ordering URL. Weirdly, there is no company name on the cover, or on the ordering pages. It does have several pages that gush, often in bold type, that I can shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year online, and it tells me how marvelously secure and confident I should be in doing so. Fair enough. What it doesn't have is a URL. I looked for a long time, getting more and more astonished at the oversight of what one would think would be the single most important piece of information they sent this thick catalogue to convey.
I got so fascinated by this that I hunted for other ways to contact them. They have a postal address in very small type. And on each of the several pages where they urge the reader to shop online they also put a phone number in large type, with smaller type alongside saying that the numbers costs 10p per minute to call. I was so impressed at how bad this was that I actually went to the trouble to send slightly sarcastic email to the one email address I could find in the catalogue (which was in tiny type in an obscure location) letting them know why I wasn't ordering, and in response I got a bounce message saying that my message could not be delivered because the user was "not listed in Domino Directory".
Wow. I think it's fair to say that this is not the apex of British retail.
In any case, the winter Olympics will be held in Hell before I pay by the minute to spell my name and address four times to a call centre operator who will get it wrong anyway. I think, though, that a marketing failure this impressive is more interesting than the robe I would have bought.