Built-in idiocy at work: more Micro-communication, less sense. And thank you, George Machun

One of the few bits of Latin I can remember is the phrase "The mountain laboured to bring forth a mouse."

Many of you, I am sure, are as baffled as I am by the way the intellectual dwarves who run Microsoft product development manage, seemingly without thought or effort, to piss away millions so as to come up with new stuff that is almost invariably worse than whatever existed previously.

The example that drives me crazy is a completely useless thing called Docx which means I infuriate half the people I correspond with as they can't read it.

To be fair, though, nothing could possibly outdo the gizmo claiming to correct your grammar. This seems to have been put together by some nitwit who can't speak a word of English, as almost without exception the advice it gives is the reverse of whatever is correct.

Come to think of it, very few IT people can speak English, so that may be the reason.

Anyhow, this preamble brings me to my friend George Machun, who after working on the Microsoft account has for the last few years been trying to get the folk at San Francisco State to market themselves properly.

He just wrote to me about the latest threat to my sanity from Microsoft which is promoted with the dire line Get the new Office 2010! 5 improved tools for home, work and school. Did anyone get paid to write that?

As he noted:

The best line was “budget planning tools that make vacations a reality”. Note to Microsoft, money makes vacations a reality, not Excel spreadsheets! And the funny part is MS spends BIG $$$ on research that results in this crap. Can you imagine the hours of meetings and conference calls it took to produce what amounts to a benefit-free piece of advertising?

I can, George, indeed I can.

P. S. Note to those interested: I shall be working on my writing seminars today - news later. And I also plan to use Survey Monkey to find out what else you would like to hear about.

Your bargain is not necessarily my bargain, Phil

Being, as they say in the North where I was brought up, "as cheap as chips", I am ever alert for a bargain, so I read this from a man called Phil with some interest.

Dear Drayton

We would like to offer DraytonBird Associates Ltd the opportunity to fill any two roles for only £995. With a massive saving of approximately £400 off our single vacancy price can you really afford to miss it?

The answer was "yes"- and I shall explain why - but I thought it was a good e-mail, because the copy mentioned they'd filled 92% of vacancies in the previous month.

I think people are the most important asset for any business, and I would never, if I could possibly help it, let them be supplied by a recruitment firm. I feel pretty much the same about "human resource" people.

Here's what happened five years ago when I was looking for a new PA.

(Stop me if you've already heard this).

My then PA at the time, Denise, suggested I could get the perfect girl - a bright 19 year old she had already spotted - from a recruitment agency for a mere £2,000 plus.

Well, the last thing I needed was a bright 19 year old, and I resented paying that much to people who are little more than body-brokers.

So I wrote an ad in 20 minutes which we stuck on Gumtree. It cost us £19, and I got 82 replies in 24 hours, and found nearly twenty likely good people. Choosing the right one was the only problem.

And what was her background? She was running a hamburger restaurant. "I've never been a PA, but believe me, there's nothing you can throw at me that' s as hard as what I do now."

She was fantastic until she went and got pregnant. She even wrote some good copy - though here native language was Brazilian Portuguese. But what recruitment agency would ever have been able to spot she was perfect?

Here's a good one from my pal Glenmore:

Don't spank potatoes in front of The Bitch

Joan Collins was being served dinner in BA business class and one of the potatoes was so hot it burnt her mouth. Ms Collins called over the steward and told him the potato had burnt her mouth.

The camp flight attendant was a little over-excited to be serving the star so took the potato and proceeded to spank it and say "Bad potato! Bad potato!" much to the mirth of fellow passengers. Joan, however, was not amused and made a complaint.

P. S. Anyone know someone literate, organised and bright who wants to work with me for nearly nothing?

Sod the football - let's beat the shit out of someone

This has little to do with marketing and not much to do with football, and is prompted by something I saw last night and something else I read this morning.

Anyhow, what with my partner being Italian and me being English we have had the dubious pleasure of first watching England who despite having most of the possession drew against the U. S. and then Italy, who had about 75% of the ball and played beautifully - but drew against Paraguay.

In both cases this was because the teams that should have won failed to finish - which reminds me of those vapid letters that end with the anodyne phrase "We look forward to hearing from you" - to which the response is "Don't hold your breath, pal."

Moving quickly on, we were watching Italy-Paraguay game in Signor Zilli on quaint old Dean Street, Soho, when across the road I saw three black men kick and beat a white man with no interference from anyone. It looked as though it was a dispute about stimulating substances, and eventually after the culprits had sauntered off at their leisure, the police arrived too late to do anything. Probably too busy filling in forms about racial quotas.

I was reminded of two things.

First, Mad Angie, my partner in the late 60's, a retired "party girl" who had been a methedrine addict told me that making drugs illegal (you could get them on prescription at that time) would lead to enormous growth in addiction and crime. She was right.

And second, I recalled something from a book I am reading about the years between the two world wars called The Morbid Age. In those days Adolph Hitler was not the only one keen on large scale euthanasia; many distinguished British and American thinkers thought the subnormal should not be allowed to breed or killed off at birth.

One phrase I read summed up what people saw as the consequences of letting the wrong people fuck: "We are getting larger and larger dregs at the bottom of our national vat". You can see lots of those dregs any night in Soho, though rarely demonstrating their character quite as vigorously as the group I saw.

Another bit I liked in the book was a classification of the congenitally subnormal as idiots (unable to look after themselves); imbeciles (unable to manage their affairs unaided); feeble-minded (requiring care and supervision); and moral defectives (deficient, but also vicious).

What baffles me is how so many of them end up in politics.

Bribery works in mysterious ways - a £200 million total waste

Many years ago I went to Chicago to try and persuade Sears they were wasting God knows how many million on untargeted newspaper inserts - offers I thought would do a lot better if carefully aimed via direct mail.

I had no luck because the man who handled the Sears account at their advertising agency - allegedly a partner of ours - stopped me even meeting the client.

There is an ocean of research showing that indiscriminate promotion doesn't pay as it degrades your brand, but a new report by research firm FastMap reveals a surprising twist.

A survey among over 1,400 shoppers commissioned by the Institute of Promotional Marketing suggests that discounts over 25% do little to get shoppers to try a new product, have no influence on subsequent loyalty, and "could be costing the industry nearly £200m a year".

Discounts work, of course - especially when times get tough. Nearly 90% of people said they had tried a different brand because of a money-off coupon and coupon redemption has shot up 70% in the last two years, with £813m redeemed in 2009.

The surprise is that a coupon with a lower discount value created greater loyalty than the reverse. Three in ten who had used a coupon worth 15p to 20p stayed with the new product afterwards but only 25% who redeemed a coupon for £1 or more kept buying it.

Over half those surveyed said they would try a different brand when given a money-off coupon worth 5p to 50p if both the rival product and their usual brand cost £2. Just 27% said the discount would have to be at least £1. This is far less than the current average discount of 48%.

One major dairy brand managed to achieve a 26.8% cost saving by reducing its coupon face value by 25%, according to Valassis MD Charles D'Oyly. This was achieved at the cost of only a 0.66% reduction in redemptions compared with past campaigns.

Research is interesting - but what is amazing to me is that these people don't test.

"All marketers are liars" - but there are limits, don't you think?

The "liars" quote is the title of a book by Seth Godin, I think.

Oddly enough I commissioned some research for a client years ago that showed that customers are not fooled. They know we are a bunch of bullshit artists.

That's why conventional advertisers, who mostly are too dozy to measure their results, neglect that powerful tool the testimonial, whilst everyone who does count uses it all the time.

Apropos of nothing much, one of the most successful mailings I ever wrote was to sell what were then the world's most expensive cruises, which is why these two pictures made me roar.

The one at the top shows what one firm promises your fellow passengers are going to be like. The one at the bottom shows what they really were. No kidding.

If we tried that stuff on in a mailing for a financial client, we'd all be rotting in jail.