FOLLIES IN MARKETING, VOL. 8

• I received an email from someone using the name "Scabbiest F. Asphyxiated," which turned out to be a porn spam. Attention spammers: I realize you guys use randomly generated names to dodge spam filters, but might I suggest you purge your word lists of words like "scabbiest" and "asphyxiated"? Even though the "BABE FACE GORGEROUS [sic] BRUNETTE HOTTIE" featured in your message is indeed attractive and flexible (as well as hungry, apparently), words that call to mind images of crusty, bleeding sores and death by suffocation just kill the mood.
  
  A bonus Folly in Marketing was in the body of the email, a collection of Aphorisms for Dummies that I suppose was designed to foil spam filters:

  We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway. The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt.
  
  The word of a gentleman is as good as his bond and sometimes better.
  
  Location, location, location.
  
  A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.Honor is unstable and seldom the same for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.
  
  Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

  Now that I think about it, maybe this email represents a Triumph in Marketing instead of a folly -- it successfully circumvented Yahoo's spam filter and got me to open it, if only for purposes of ridicule.
  
  
• I found a pamphlet in the lunch room at my job advertising the services of Jordan Dechtman, metro Denver's self-proclaimed retirement planning specialist. Go see his website here -- it has most of the same photos as the pamphlet, and as a bonus you can enjoy a snappy Flash montage of frisky retirees fishing and playing the saxophone and not mopping the floor at McDonald's.
  
  I learned a lot about Jordan Dechtman by reading his pamphlet. For instance, he has what must be the squarest jaw in the six-county area, and probably the entire Front Range. If I were Jordan Dechtman, I'd forget financial planning and take a carnival job pounding iron spikes into cinder blocks with my jaw.
  
  "When [Jordan Dechtman] lost his father at 18," the pamphlet informs us, "he quickly realized the importance of proper financial planning." Does it strike anyone else as sick and wrong to flog a parent's death to gain financial planning clients? This just creeps me out. It's like George Costanza using a picture of his dead fiancée to hit on supermodels.
  
  Click "Meet Jordan Dechtman" to see a photo of Jordan Dechtman in golf shorts and snazzy golf shoes, lining up a putt and, from the look on his face, working out a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. The caption states that "when time allows, Jordan tees it up." Well, so what? Am I hiring a financial planner or a golf coach? I don't care if Jordan Dechtman throws rocks at puppies in his spare time, as long as he gets me a 15% annual return. On the other hand, he does have awfully nice legs for a man his age.
  
  Also on the "Meet Jordan Dechtman" page is a photo of Jordan Dechtman with his wife Kathy, twin boys Sam and Adam, daughter Alana, and dog Buddy. This photo caught my attention for five reasons: (1) it looks like it belongs in a political campaign pamphlet, (2) Alana wears her hair in cornrows, (3) Buddy was almost certainly rented for the occasion, (4) the Dechtman family, by my estimate, ranks no lower than sixth among the world's denim-consuming nations, and (5) Kathy, while not a BABE FACE GORGEROUS BRUNETTE HOTTIE, has a definite grab-a-handful-of-my-soccer-mom-hairdo-and-fuck-me-in-the-back-seat-of-the-Land-Rover appeal.
  
  
• I bought a box of Archer Farms grilled salmon fillets. The box said it contained five fillets, but when I got home I found that it contained six fillets. I looked at the box more closely and saw that it promised to contain "approximately 5 fillets." (See photo here.) I'm not going to complain about receiving a bonus salmon fillet, but isn't this a little dumb on the part of Archer Farms? Do they hire people who are so stupid and unskilled that they can't count to five?
  
  "Well, Kilgore," you are saying, "salmon fillets come in different sizes, so maybe they put five small fillets in the box and had to add a sixth to make the promised weight."
  
  Yeah, maybe, except that each of these fillets was exactly the same size and shape -- they're not "fillets" so much as "rectangular fish nuggets." So why not put exactly five fillets in each box instead of approximately five? It's like saying a Honda Accord comes with "approximately four wheels" or a Big Mac comes with "approximately two beef patties."

+posted by Lawrence @ 12/30/2004 05:06:00 PM