Tom Moertel's Weblog: Category marketing

Netflix: don't act like weasels

Tom Moertel — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:21:00 -0400

Today I had a problem with my Netflix subscription that was clearly outside the realm of the online Help Center. When I tried to find the phone number for Netflix customer support, however, I could not.

It turns out that Netflix is engaging in the weasel-like behavior of hiding its phone number from paying customers. The phone number is omitted from the Contact Us page. Searching for “phone” in the Help Center turns up the “How do I contact Customer Service?” question, the answer to which turns out to be, “Most problems can be solved by our extensive online help system… If you’re still having trouble, email Customer Service.” In other words, Don’t Call Us.

Forget that. Google and Hacking Netflix make it easy to find Netflix’s support numbers. To make it easier for you to find them, here they are:

Netflix customer support
1-800-715-2120
1-888-638-3549

Note to Reed Hastings: Hiding your company’s phone numbers shows a lack of respect for your paying customers. (So does limiting DVD-rental rates stochastically via a cleverly designed fulfillment-prioritization policy while using weasel words to pretend that your services are “unlimited.”)

Update 2007-09-21: I am happy to update this article with good news: Netflix recently decided to replace e-mail-based customer service with 24-hour telephone support. The phone number is easy to find on the Netflix web site, too.

Score one for Reed Hastings.

Mini-review of CafePress's direct-printed t-shirts

Tom Moertel — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:48:00 -0400

As you may recall from a previous post, I set up a CafePress store to sell LectroTest Robot–branded stuff such as t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, magnets, and so on. CafePress does a good job of making their products appear to be of the highest quality, but I am naturally skeptical about such claims.

In particular, I wondered about their t-shirts. The results of their heat-transfer printing process – previously the only option – did not make me happy. Images with transparent areas revealed the transfer background, which over time yellowed and made the image seem to float on a sea of urine.

So when I set up The LectroTest Emporium, I specified the use of CafePress’s newer “direct-printing” process for t-shirts, hats, and every other product for which it was offered. Still, I wondered about the quality.

So I ordered up a LectroTest Robot t-shirt and put it to the test.

Test one: the eyeball and the scanner

When the t-shirt arrived, my initial impression was that it looked pretty darn good. The Robot came out perfectly, and even the pointy parts of the LectroTest lightning rendered without problems. The colors were true, if a little less saturated than I would have preferred.

Compared to silkscreen, the direct-printing process seems to produce results that are a bit less saturated and a bit less crisp. It’s like an airbrush artist rendered the Robot onto a billboard-sized shirt that was carefully shrunken to normal size.

Next, I threw the t-shirt on a flatbed scanner. The results are below. The first image is an overall view of the Robot logo. The second is a 300-dpi close-up of the lettering, where you can see the air-brush effect.

Test two: the iron

To check for color offsetting, I turned the shirt inside out and ironed it on a full-steam, cotton setting. Throughout the ironing, the face of the front-side image was pressed into the white cotton of the back side of the shirt. Nevertheless, none of the ink migrated. The pure white remained pure white.

Test three: the washer

For the final test, I washed the shirt on a normal warm/cold cycle with a small load of other clothes. I then dried the clothing on a medium cycle. (CafePress recommends washing in cold water and drying on low, but nobody pampers their t-shirts like that, and so I tested under more typical conditions.)

When I took the shirt from the dryer, I didn’t see any signs of shrinkage or fading. To double-check, I ironed the shirt and threw it back on the flatbed scanner.

Doing a before-and-after comparison of the scans in the Gimp, I was able to see some shrinkage and fading (see image below). Top to bottom, the shirt shrank by about 4.5 percent; left to right, the shirt actually grew by about 1.8 percent. Minor fading was apparent, especially in the solid black areas. Neither the shrinkage nor the fading were concerning, however; both are typical for t-shirts, especially on the initial washing. The bottom line is that the shirt’s coolness was untarnished.

Summary

It’s a good t-shirt. It looked cool out of the box and fully captured the metallic fierceness of the beloved LectroTest Robot. The shirt handled a hot-steam ironing without any ink offsetting. It shrank and faded a bit on its initial wash, but neither change detracted meaningfully from the shirt. In sum, CafePress’s direct-printed t-shirts seem like the real deal: they look good and stand up to typical wear and washing.

LectroTest: new release, new talk, and the new LectroTest Emporium!

Tom Moertel — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:21:00 -0400

I have a bunch of LectroTest news. LectroTest, as you may know, is a specification-based, automatic testing system for Perl. It may look like Haskell’s QuickCheck, but it tastes like sweet, sweet Perl.

LectroTest 0.3500 was released

This version adds automatic tools for recording and playing back failures. Using them, you can automatically build regression-testing suites and incorporate them into your testing plan. All it takes is one new line of code:

use Test::LectroTest
    regressions => "regressions.txt";   # <-- that's it!

See the docs on CPAN for more.

My thanks to Steffen Müller, who suggested the feature and is already using it in cool stuff such as Number::WithError.

Slides from “Testing Tips with LectroTest” are now online

You can get the slides from my talk to the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers on 2006-06-14 here: Talk / Testing Tips with LectroTest. In the talk, I covered some of the newer LectroTest features, such as regression testing and Test::LectroTest::Compat, which lets you mix LectroTest with other Perl testing modules.

The LectroTest Emporium opens!

I have very little artistic ability. Nevertheless, alarming numbers of people seem to love the fiercely metallic mascot I created for LectroTest.

At the last Perl Mongers meeting, for example, people actually told me (somewhat sternly) I should put the adorable LectroTest Robot on t-shirts. I am now delighted to announce that I have taken their advice:

Introducing: The LectroTest Emporium

Some important points:

Yes, it’s a CafePress store
I’m not making any money on these things
I’m using direct printing, not heat-transfer printing, so the Robot won’t crack, feel stiff, or suffer from a yellowish transfer background. (CafePress has a comparison of the methods if you want the full details.)

Some items I have moral reservations about offering:

LectroTest Robot Teddy Bear - Who would be so reckless as to allow something as fierce and as powerful as the LectroTest Robot to come into direct contact with a defenseless, cuddly teddy bear?
LectroTest Robot Baby Bib - Actually, this is a great idea: your infant and the Robot exist in a symbiotic relationship. When your baby gets food all over the bib, the Robot will consume it (using a electrochemical process not entirely dissimilar to our human concept of “digestion”). Thus is the baby cleaned and the Robot fueled. It’s win-win.
LectroTest Robot Dog T-Shirt - I am fairly certain that the immense weight of the Robot would easily crush any smaller animal. This product strikes me as a very bad idea.

The T-shirts, on the other hand, are the robot’s meow. Check out the full collection at The LectroTest Emporium.

Unofficial answers to FAQs about Giant Eagle's “fuelperks” gas discount

Tom Moertel — Wed, 03 May 2006 22:49:00 -0400

Local supermarket chain Giant Eagle has a brilliant marketing scheme called “fuelperks”: For every 50 dollars you spend on groceries in their stores, you earn a one-time, 10-cent-per-gallon discount at Giant Eagle’s “GetGo” gas stations. The discounts accumulate until you use them (or they expire in three months). If you buy 109 dollars of groceries, for example, you will earn a 20-cent-per-gallon gas discount. (The remaining 9 dollars will carry over to your next grocery purchase.)

What makes the scheme brilliant is that its psychological effect is wildly in excess of the discount’s actual value. Many people will wait in lines to buy gas from GetGo, even though the discount provides no incentive to do so. Further, as gas prices rise, many customers perceive the discount to be all the more valuable, even though it is not.

I thought it would be interesting to scrutinize the discount and answer some common questions about it.

How much is the “fuelperks” discount worth?

The discount is typically equivalent to about 3- to 4-percent cash back on your grocery purchases, depending on the average amount of gas you purchase per fill-up. For example, my mid-size car has a 14-gallon tank, and I always buy a full tank’s worth of gas, so for me the discount is about 2.8 percent:

14 gallons × 0.10 dollars/gallon / 50 dollars = 0.028

If you drive a luxury-barge SUV and can manage to buy a full 30 gallons at each fill up, you will earn the theoretical maximum discount of 6 percent.

How do I get the maximum benefit from the discount?

To get the maximum benefit, follow two simple rules:

buy a full tank of gas whenever you use earned discounts at GetGo
use your discounts before they expire

Do I lose benefits if I buy gas somewhere else?

No. Even if you buy most of your gas somewhere else, as long as you buy gas from GetGo frequently enough to use your discounts before they expire, you will get the maximum benefit.

When gas prices increase, do I get more benefits?

No. The value of any discounts you have earned depend on the quantity of gas you purchase. The price of gas at the time of purchase has no effect on the discount.

Any other questions?

If you have any questions (or comments), please post a comment.

Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Tom Moertel — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:26:00 -0500

Recently I visited Amazon.com and was assaulted by a fat stream of marketing blurbs. Amazon tried to convince me that I was actually enjoying an innovative blog written by my favorite authors, each trying to “connect” with me, but I found the attempt to be shallow and annoying. To me, it was still a fat stream of marketing blurbs.

And what do the marketing wizards at Amazon call this blurb stream? Your Plog.

Amazon explains it like this:

Your Plog. Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

I explain it like this:

Your Plog. Amazon.com thinks you want your time and attention delivered to every guy who wrote a book that you somehow indicated interest in. You don’t. Your favorite authors already have blogs, and you already subscribe to the ones you care about. As a result, Your Plog contains nothing but stuff you don’t care about and stuff you might have cared about, had you not read it five times already from other sources. It is an annoying waste of your time and attention, foisted on you by the ravenous marketing weasels at Amazon.com.

For example, whenever the Pragmatic guys come out with a new book on Ruby or Rails, I hear about it from Andy Hunt’s blog, Dave Thomas’s blog, the Riding Rails blog, emails from Andy, ruby-talk postings from Dave, and now – thanks to “my” Plog – Amazon’s home page. (In fact, my Plog contains no fewer than three blurbs from the Pragmatic guys – all stuff I have seen before. I like the Pragmatic Programmers and think Andy and Dave are good guys, but I don’t see what they gain by being associated with Amazon’s Plog-based marketing.)

Other takes on the Plog

Here’s what other people are writing about Plogs. From Changing Way:

When I go to amazon.com these days, I’m shown a “plog.” What does this ugly term mean? It told that it denotes a weblog personalized to me. What it turns out to be is a blog by someone I bought a book from years ago. I’ve nothing against this person or her book. Neither do I think that her blog is bad. It’s just not of interest to me, and so doesn’t belong on Amazon’s home page, or on my “personalized” version of it.

From FactoryCity comes a post entitled Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” – if that’s really the best you could come up with – and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage – should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

Amy Gahran has a more analytical consideration of Plogs in Amazon ‘Plogs’ – What Do You Think?:

I think the idea of plogs may have great potential for relationship-building, if implemented carefully and with an eye toward timeliness and relevance. But frankly, this Amazon implementation feels off-base to me so far…. Well, [an author’s participating in Plogging] could be terrific or terrible, depending on the content quality and relevance [of the author’s contributions].

Bingo. That’s why Amazon’s Plog concept will remain more annoying than useful. Authors do not want Amazon to own what they consider to be their conversations, and thus the Plog will be used as little more than a marketing mailing list.

Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation

It’s the quality of the conversation that counts, and smart authors will not want their conversations to be confined to Amazon. Instead, they will set up their own sites where they can have greater freedom and greater control. That’s where the authors will open themselves to honest conversation, and that’s where the best stuff will occur.

Amazon’s Plogs will get the scraps – bits of the real conversation that have been converted into marketing blurbs and pushed down the Plog channel. In fact, it already seems to be going that way: a lot of “posts” in my Plog appear to have been recycled from real blogs or web sites.

Amazon, count me out

Even though my immediate reaction to discovering “my” Plog was mild disgust, I did try to give it a chance. After having given it a week to grow on me, I am convinced that I want nothing to do with my Plog. It wastes my time and attention and gives me little in return.

Did Amazon Plog you yet? If so, what do you think?