Would you perhaps be trying to sell me something?
It’s a question I have to ask regularly of the direct marketing scum that call me on the phone: “Excuse me, are you calling me to sell me something?” For some reason, the phonetards try to postpone the anti-climax of the conversation as long as possible by trying to obscure the reason for their call. This is because it’s not really a conversation. The longer they can convince me that we are having a conversation, the better it is for them.
But direct marketing is push. It’s in your face, it is unwanted, it is begging for me to take out the baseball bat and come by to clean the pond. You don’t expect pull marketeers to make life more difficult for the prospective customer. Any ad that has to lure me over basically has to make life as smooth as possible for me.
And I guess when Inmatrix put up a webpage to promote their Zoomplayer Pro product, their intention really was to make life easier for me. After all, if I find out after the fact that I cannot use their product, they’re are going to have one cross, baseball bat-owning customer on their hands. Nevertheless, if I read all the things I have to do for the privilige of using their product, I feel the need to grab my credit card dissipate immediately.
The list of requirements is this long because of Microsoft’s perfidious DRM scheme.
But! If you are going to have a page titled: “Why should I buy this product?,” don’t make the list of cons three times as long. Put that list on another page, titled Requirements, and keep the Why page for the good news.
DRM gone mad, I tells you!
Related earlier posts:
- Digital durability (about a government site promoting digital durability which leads by example, er, 404)
- It’s official: civil servants are nuts (about a government site promoting readable URLs at an unreadable URL)
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