Don't serve me shit and tell me it's chic
Literal shit, in this case.
There’s nothing worse for a paying customer than being given a shit service. Especially when that shit is literal.
As I might have mentioned in the past, my hobby is tormenting myself with terrible football/supporting the mighty Leeds United (delete as applicable given current state of the promotion race). So I pay attention to the marketing guff they send to me.
Like, I could probably have written a newsletter about the everything wrong in this email from a copy perspective:
No actual sell, no appeal to emotion, no mention of scarcity given how few new season tickets are on sale this year. The cardinal sin of remarketing - no personalisation. They don’t even go for something inclusive like “Dear member.” You’re just a person holding a ticket. They don’t really care if you feel like a part of the team.
But then they don’t have to. It’s a captive audience. Leeds might go up, so 99% of season ticket holders will renew. Even if prices have gone up again.
I could even have taken a little pot-shot at this email:
Where to start with that? The tone is corporate beige. The benefit reduces the most exciting part of a game - Dan James chipping one in from halfway - to the incredibly dull “key moments in inverted commas,” and it’s got a little bit of nanny says behave yourself in there to boot.
And that’s without the unexplained change in brand colours and font.
But I didn’t decide to pick that apart. Instead I want to share one picture, and a lesson.
Here’s the picture. The lesson will follow.
Even if your audience is so desperate to buy that you barely need to sell to them. Even if your audience is so engaged that you can do without tone of voice or benefits or any of the basics of marketing as you put your prices up by 15%. You always need to deliver a quality product.
Because even the most amazing sales pitch about exciting new seats would fall flat when your customers realise that the bird crap that’s been on the wall in front of that seat since 2016 is still there1.
As goes marketing, so goes customer service. If you don’t put the effort in, everything quickly looks a bit shit.
Something mint - this ad someone I know saw in a paper
I warned Catherine Every that I was nicking her picture. Didn’t warn her it’d immediately follow a picture of some avian leavings.
It’s a great concept. Intelligence matters, not word count, especially when those words are even more dull, more beige and more corporate than a Leeds United ground upgrade missive.
It’s like I got hauled over the coals for saying - loving needlessly verbose word constructions means naff all to readers. It’s all about that message.
If you’re mithered, the 2016 vintage guano is on the left. Here it is at the start of the season. Nice work, Leeds.
The bird turd on the right arrived along with the swish new seating.