Seemant's Entries in Category: Marketing

Update: I hereby rescind the update I made in my Circuit City post: Office Depot has not pulled their creepy hand spots yet. Maybe they're taking the tack that any exposure is good exposure, in which case I feel sorry for them (but not enough to shop there :) ) Back when I was blogging about Gentoo being a development platform more than a user platform, I got an email from Stuart telling me about a book ...

Here's an update: Office Depot has actually pulled their ad spots with the disembodied hand. Seems like enough bloggers (including yours truly) called them out on its creepiness to have an effect. More "me too" advertising, but this one has a couple of twists: it's a two-pronged "me too" approach. It was bound to happen, of course. Slowly but surely, more and more people know about the Firefox browser. Interestingly enough, though, I've found that the name Mozilla ...

I'm filing this in the "me too" advertising section (when I get around to having such a section). So, there's some US wireless carrier called Alltel which launched this new cool feature that lets you call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for free. They call this feature "My Circle," which is nice and catchy. And of course, within weeks, you can't walk through a mall without hearing about T-Mobile's response, which they've ...

Ignoring, for a moment, the conjunction of those two words with respect to cults and organisations (and some fraternities), I'd like to share some thoughts about branding and loyalty in airlines. As you, my dear readers, might recall, Aimee and I had gone to Los Angeles and Oklahoma for Thanksgiving (late November), and then to Jamaica for Christmas. Well, as it turned out, we had two starkly contrasting airline experiences. For the first trip, we booked all ...

For those of you not familiar with this, there are two major office supply chains in the US: Staples and Office Depot. They both stock pretty much the same stuff; they're both in strip malls all across this great land. And they're both Red. You know, the font, the entryway, the building's facade. Same shade of red. Oh yeah, there's also Office Max, but that's red too. Or it was, the last time I saw one, anyway. ...

Had a nice relaxing weekend. Hung out with aimee, did some chores, bought a few more items of furniture for the apartment. I also had the unfortunate opportunity to watch that "Jackass 2" movie. My god, why is that piece of crap the #1 movie in America? Why would people watch that idiocy? (I didn't know anything about it, I actually do have an excuse). But here's the more important question: why would people do all that stuff in ...

Over the past 6 months or more, I've been thinking about where I'm headed, what I'm doing, and what I'd like to be doing. This is mainly career related, I guess. Comes from being in your thirties, maybe? Anyway, I looked back over the 5 odd years I've been with Gentoo, and I realised that what I enjoyed most about being with Gentoo was the developer relations stuff. Not the firing and all that crap, no. The stuff about ...

So, apparently, the banking industry has made new rules to dick customers out of their money. It's not enough that the bank holds all your money already. Now they want to keep some of it for good. So if you post-date a check by 2 days, your bank can still cash it and then charge you oodles and ooodles of money for "overdraft protection." The date is simply unimportant to the honouring the check part. No matter that you have ...