Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2025

The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

  • Do NOT try to close.
  • Do NOT try to sell.
  • Do NOT try to persuade.
  • Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.

That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.

And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.

[…]

We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.

But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.

They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.

HMS Eskimo (F75) – Guide 362

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 18 Nov 2023

HMS Eskimo, a destroyer of the British Royal Navy, is today’s subject.
(more…)

QotD: The Subaru BRAT

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Japan, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Imagine, if you can, a truck with factory-mounted seats in the bed — and spotlights the size of a 747’s landing lights mounted on its T-topped roof.

If you know this truck, you also know why it’s no longer available.

Such fun things are no longer allowed.

They are not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! “Moms” are “concerned”!

But in 1977, the Safety Cult — which ended such fun things — was still a backwater aberration, like dancing with rattlesnakes — and most people still esteemed fun over fear. There were roofless Broncos and K5 Blazers — and cars with beds.

You could buy all kinds of different stuff back when America was still a fairly free country — and the Subaru BRAT was as different as it got.

BRAT — all caps — was short for Bi-Drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter. It was superficially similar to other small import pickups of the ’70s, such as the Datsun 620 and similar models from Toyota (SR5), Mazda (B210), and Chevy (via Isuzu) Luv.

But unlike them, it was a four seater — with two of the four in the bed, facing the other way. The seats were made of all-weather plastic and far from the most comfortable — but the view was spectacular. Watching the world recede as you progressed is another one of many freedoms denied today in the name of “safety”.

Subaru wasn’t “unconcerned” about “safety”. Grab handles — to keep passengers from bouncing out of the bed — were included. Though holding onto them made it harder to reach for a cold one in the cooler. That was another fun thing people did in pickups back in the day — before the Safety Cult put the kibosh on that, too.

The seats were actually a dodge — of a federal fatwa known as the “chicken tax”, which was a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent applied to import-brand pickups manufactured outside the United States as tit-for-tat for tariffs applied by foreign countries to American chicken exported outside the United States.

The “chicken tax” hit trucks with just two seats — at the time almost exclusively the small import models, which didn’t offer the extended and crew cab configurations that are commonplace today.

By adding the extra seats in the bed, BRAT qualified as a passenger vehicle rather than a “light truck”, and thus Subaru evaded the chicken tax on a happy technicality — and was also able to sell the BRAT for less than two-seater rivals that had the cost of the tax folded into their MSRP.

Eric Peters, “Doomed: Subaru BRAT (1977-87)”, The American Spectator, 2020-04-26.

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