Jack's life advice: If you're trying to sell something, TELL PEOPLE WHAT IT IS

[jack]

This one is something of a cheat, because I'm advising people on something I WANT them to do, not actually what's necessarily best for them, simply because I want to browbeat them into doing it.

But if you're trying to sell something, TELL PEOPLE WHAT IT IS.

That's not actually true. If you're trying to sell a hunk of crap, it may well be more effective to sell it to people on spurious grounds. It may be more effective to:

* bundle mobile phones with mobile phone contracts and lie to people about which is which
* make a mediocre product and advertise the heck out of it because it's "fun" without specifying what's good about it
* claim something is a "necessity" for modern life without saying what it does

But I wish:

* Film posters are many square meters large (A-2 or something); they should devote a sentence somewhere, even in small print, to telling you what the film is about. If it's small enough, surely all the people who want to see it because it has a cool name and a famous actor in will not be put off, but people who say "wow, that sounds cool" will be enticed?

* Shaving foam, shampoo, non-rechargeable batteries, etc had "shaving foam", "shampoo", "non-rechargeable battery" written on them somewhere.

* Mobile phone sellers had a table of the options you might want, and their cost, rather than collating them into arbitrary bundles with stupid names, and

Comments

[seryn]

I buy different brands of shampoo and conditioner for precisely this reason.

For a long time I bought Thermasilk shampoo and conditioner because the shampoo was in a dark purple bottle and the conditioner in a pale lavender color bottle. I'd searched for them in the store because of their dragon commercial and bought them because of the useful packaging that matched my towels. Of course it's been discontinued entirely.

The diet soda is very distinguishable by not being in my house. ;-)

[jack]

:) And in fact, my hair is so short I'm pretty happy to put anything in the shower on them.

[seryn]

Let's hope you keep your soda somewhere other than the bathroom then, otherwise you'd be the sticky monster.

[jack]

Drain cleaner would be more of a problem :) But fortunately, no, I can pretty much tell the difference between sodium laurenth sulphate bottles and other ones. (In fact, my shower gel and shampoo are normally different colours as well, just not always.)