John Malmo

A Forbes Magazine article recently gave the University of Colorado Cancer Center as an example of good customer service. I’m gonna tell you some of the things it mentioned. Then see if you can identify what all have in common.

Television’s share of American advertising dollars is expected to have grown this year by about one-and-a-half percentage points over last year.

How can that be, you ask. What about the enormous growth in the Internet, the explosion of social media advertising?

The splintering of advertising media has been like a fragmentation grenade. Media segments. Then the segments segment. And it’s this very splintering that each year makes television more valuable to advertisers. Because television remains the one medium that still can deliver a big audience.

Almost all retailers constantly are trying to think up ways to get more people into their stores. And it gets harder and harder to come up with new ploys.

But occasionally they come up with an offer so good that it scares them. So the retailer starts adding conditions to make the offer less costly to the store.

Listen to this offer from Staples: a coupon worth twenty dollars off an in-store purchase of twenty dollars or more. One day only at the Memphis store only.  

A booklet came recently entitled Comcast XFinity Customer Privacy Notice. It is forty-eight pages. That’s a lot of overkill about privacy, I thought. So I opened it. Twenty-two pages about privacy in English. Then twenty-six more pages of the same message in Spanish.

Who ever thought he’d live to say, “Pity the poor bank.”

But, goodness, everybody’s after banks today. The president. Congress. Wall Street. Even the Wall Street Journal. Banks are today’s whipping boy.

Well I know a lot of bankers who are good guys, but, lordy, it’s hard to like a bank. It’s stuff like this. One day recently comes this letter from Chase Bank. I guess because one of my credit cards is a Chase Bank card. Right off the bat, the letter asks me to respond to update my preference for receiving offers by mail from Chase.