plonewars.com

Given that it’s the year 2007, you’d think companies would’ve cottoned on to a few cliched, cheesy, unbelievable and outright silly things that they shouldn’t try to market themselves with. I guess not. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels turned off by a company which uses one or more of these techniques:

• Taglines like Your main supplier of … or Your experts in …. Seriously, I’ve not heard about you before. You’re not my anything.
• Anything involving an explamation mark.
• Anything involving more than one explamation mark.
• Anything involving an exclamation mark and a question mark next to each other.
• Other grammatical atrocities, such as using numbers as phonetic replacements for words, or trying to spell things phonetically. JooToobe anyone?
  
• Pictures of attractive women with headsets waiting to take your call. Call centre operators are, by and large, not very attractive, and in any event I wouldn’t be able to see them. This argument counts doubly for the kind of companies that advertise exclusively in London telephone booths.
• Other images which were obviously purchased as stock photos.
• Pseudo-diversity. I used to work for someone who had a stock photo of a black hand shaking a white one. They also had one black employee. It wasn’t his hand.
• Anyone who insists on getting an email address (or worse, a contact number) before possibly divulging the price of something.
• Gyms.
• Over-use of superlatives or claims to being a silver bullet for whatever problem. I would come up with an example, but the most superb example I know of comes from Tom Wait’s Step Right Up.
• Websites which look like this. Bonus for the dancing robot though.
• Websites which don’t work in Firefox and/or Safari. “But most of the world uses Internet Explorer” is just a pathetic excuse these days.
• Companies or products which attempt to speak to customers in the first person. “Hi, I’m your friendly supplier of …” or “let me give you a hand with that”. The UK tax return is like that, and it’s damned irritating. Of course, I wouldn’t trust the taxman anyway.

Oh well. Enough procrastination for a while, back to work.