Some call it spin. Does it work over the long term?
- Call it a free trial but take credit cards and start charging people two weeks later if they don’t remember to cancel first.
- Give away your accounting software for free because free customers have switching costs and need upgrades. Call it a donation for small business.
- Call your consulting company an institute. Hey, maybe you can actually make it a nonprofit company and still pay yourself a good living. Institute sounds so much more reassuring.
- Bug people to renew their virus checker six weeks before it expires, then start their annual subscription the day they renew. That’s cool: sell a 12-month subscription every 10 or 11 months.
- Pad your endorsements. After all, who can check?
I like to think that kind of behavior doesn’t pay off over the long term. It increases the business friction. It increases the chance of angry customers. It’s like the opposite of insurance. Is this good business? Do you think it works?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Tim: I would add to your list firms that claim to be social service firms or environmentally friendly but aren’t.
I think this is a rapidly growing problem as more companies see the marketing advantages of claiming a social purpose.
Steve
I agree that unfortunately this is a fast growing problem especially on the internet where legitimate and honorable businesses are being scrutinized for insincerity because of this growing problem.
There’s a whole population of displaced execs and middle managers that are ”reinventing“ themselves on the web — carpetbaggers for the new millennium. One guy wants to share his 20 years of successful sales experience working from the C-Level on down (despite the fact he’s never met a C-level in his life. He writes and speaks extensively and has done neither, and when there’s a 70% failure rate in certain system adoption/rollouts, but the many he has led were all standing ovation successes (he’s never done a full roll out and barely know what these programs are). But, due to a legal issue, he negotiated a significant severance, which he put into multiple websites to hide the illusion of a one-man shop, hired a writer, publicist, and he always dressed well, but he says nothing new or insightful…. xxx xxxx xxx xx, xxxxxxxxxx xxxxx x xxx,…. but he looks good and I’m sure he even hired a style consultant. Of course it’ll catch up to him (right?), in the meantime, it’s just someone else giving consultants a bad name.
There’s a great line in the TV show Mad Men: “Hey don’t worry about it. It’s the sixties — you can be whoever you want to be…”