Tagged: John Malmo

One of the hardest jobs consultants have is convincing companies to spend to keep existing customers, instead of putting everything into chasing new customers. 

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.

Increasingly, whatever I buy includes English and Spanish labels, instructions, warranties. I wrote a column in The Commercial Appeal twenty years ago warning this would happen if Congress didn’t make English the official language of the United States. I didn’t think it would come to pass in my lifetime. I had spent years creating advertising and sales literature for clients in Canada. All had to be in English and in French. What a waste.