(As goes the terribly blasphemous rugby song that I can’t seem to find a link to)… and now so do we. Like David, I’m wistful… I opened a WaMu account on my second or third day in town when I moved to Seattle back in 1999 and have always been 100% pleased with the customer service. Sad that it failed on the very date of its 119th anniversary. But the FDIC appears to have managed an awfully smooth transition… a run on the bank would have been really scary and much more damaging to the health and sanity of the market. We do have a lot of friends who work for WaMu and hope that their jobs are secure for as long as possible.

I suppose JP Morgan Chase is about as strong a bank as exists in these uncertain times, but I would have preferred Citi to have bought WaMu out… our Australian bank account is with Citi and at the rate things are going we might just need to make a transfer and cut our losses. Only, of course, if America goes all battered wife on us and re-elects the party that has given her 8 years of black eyes, red ink and moral bankruptcy. Here’s hoping Barack wins decisively against Grandpa Simpson tonight!

Secrets of The IKEA Naming System revealed. I cannot express how much I love knowing things like this:

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names

Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names

Bookcase ranges: Occupations

Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays

You have to read the whole list. Quite a nice blog on naming and branding overall.

(Sorry, by the way, for the radio silence. And happy new year.)

I would so hire the person that answered as follows to this brain-teaser question during an interview:

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike stationary, maybe with a fan blowing in the person’s face. He probably wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

I think it’s a great answer. It avoids anything impractical, and it’s entertaining to boot!

I agree with the general thrust of the article: as much as I love riddles, I don’t think they’re much help in finding a good candidate. Maybe early on when the concept was novel it was a good way to see into a candidates thinking processes, but when the candidate studies possible questions and when the interviewer is interested in the answer, not the thought process, it’s nothing more than a silly memory test.

“..a Pennsylvania man is now crying foul after he got the short end of the stick in an unfortunate “mishap.” The retired carpenter, who had visited the Philadelphia Park casino before, dropped his two quarters into a Wheel of Fortune slot machine only to win $102,000 — or so he thought. The machine proudly conveyed his winnings right alongside his actual name, sending his emotions into a jovial whirlwind, but apparently the machine wasn’t exactly supposed to, you know, let people hit the jackpot, and now he’s fighting just to get his due reward. A spokesperson for the venue stated that it “was just an error in the communication system,” but added the mistake seems to have originated in the in-house computing system, not within the machine itself. The man was offered “two tickets to the buffet” (saywha?) and advised to read the disclaimer on the machine, nullifying any awards if the machine malfunctions, but he still feels that this “fault” is illegitimate.”  stolen from engadget.

if i’m reading this correctly, this begs the question: if a central computer is dictating which machines win and how much they pay out, is it any longer a game of chance?  does it then become a game of controlled loss? i mean odds are odds but is it still considered chance when a computer decides that it only pays out once every 3,409,403 times played and only 10% of what it takes in because that’s what statistics COULD dictate? if so, i’m in the wrong business.

Bill Gates is quitting Microsoft. Or at least winding down and leaving for good in 2008. It is cool that he’s doing it so he can spend more time on his foundation. Unless he’s secretly preparing to run for President. That would be interesting. So will the gyration of the stock price tomorrow.

Why do I have to yell and throw a “hissy fit” when I need a corporate customer service organization to do the right thing?  Is it really that customer service is dead or is it something more sinister – is their CRM system telling the service rep on the other end of the line that I am not one their most valuable customers and therefore I can be f*cked with mercilessly?

Anyone who has been reading this blog long enough already knows that I skirt the edge of professional paranoid.  However, I think I may have hit upon the true reason that I never receive good (or even halfway decent) customer service – I have a low “lifetime value” as a customer.  In fact, I probably cause most of my vendors to lose money in maintaining me as a customer.

As a professional marketer, I almost never respond to direct mail or other advertisements in a vendor’s attempt to upsell me to a more expensive item or service.  Rather, I spend a few minutes dissecting the piece for its relative merits and faults before I toss it away.  But this Lifetime Customer Value thing is big business and I think it is undermining the very thing it was originally designed to support – personalized service.  When 1-to-1 marketing was first promoted, it focused on how to increase the value of your customer base by serving or anticipating their needs better.  Now it is about culling the fattest calves from the herd and sh*tting on the rest.

The vendors that provide me with truly personal service I reward with not only my loyalty but with referrals and testimonials.  The ones that treat me like a number and a set of behaviors I ditch at the first opportunity and steer people away from every chance I get.  I realize that it is unfashionable to have customer service agents that actually care about resolving a customer’s issue or speak English as a first language.  And until we as consumers rise up as one and slay the evil market whores vote with our dollars on a large scale we will have to yell and throw stupendous verbal fits in order to get our lifetime value returned.

The American digital video recording pioneer TiVo promised yesterday that subscribers would soon be able to watch recorded TV programmes on their video iPods or portable Sony PlayStations. TiVo expects to release software in the new year which will enable iPod and PSP users to download their favourite shows

You may even get an autosync feature…
Thank you TiVo, I can now watch all the Military and HG Channel shows I want on my iPod. This raises the question, do I download from iTunes for $1.99 a show or pay $45 and get all I have time to convert? I guess this depends on the amount of free time you have. I see a battle brewing.

Here’s another…

Read this cool summary.

Industrial design mag Core 77 has an amazing interview with Rob Walker. I’ll admit it–even before his star turn with the NYT Mag’s Consumed column, I was a Rob Walker fanboy. Back when he was doing the ad report card for Slate, I emailed him a couple of times and he wrote nice, thoughtful replies.

I find his writing sync eerily with what my firm is working on and talking about. Eerie as in like, “Is there a bug in someone’s office?!?” I’m not sure if the bug would be in his, or ours. Probably his, but only if he reads aloud while typing. [My pondering this is precisely how you know I’m a fanboy.] I guess it’s best just to autocongratulate all around by saying that great minds really must think alike. But this interview is no different… he talks about one of our biggest recent projects:

When I look at the Lance Armstrong bracelet, I start at the other end and ask, “What did the consumer respond to?” It could be the design, but it could be any number of other things. I don’t know that that bracelet is going to be studied in design schools as a beautiful object. (I could be wrong about that.)

The product should speak for itself, but it’s more interesting to me to discover what consumers are actually listening to. I truly think that the Lance Armstrong bracelet is a useless object, but for all the things that could become a craze, it’s certainly more positive for society than the pet rock—not that I have anything against the pet rock.

Compare the Lance Armstrong bracelet to another current hit product, the iPod. The iPod and the bracelet are so different; you can see so many functional reasons for buying the iPod. For me, I thought it was expensive, but cool, and it took me three months to decide to buy one. I rationalized it by thinking about how much travel I do and how useful it is on the plane and in the gym. You can come up with all these reasons. There may be counterarguments for each and every one, but at least there are many arguments to make.

Anyway, if anyone is hunting a gift for me any time soon, I would love one of these. Or this. And if you’re into this kind of conversation, remind me to tell you when and if I get any more issues of his sporadic but entirely amazing “Journal of Murketing.”

Good old John Dvorak had it right all along. Apple is finally porting the Mac OS to Intel chips–actually, they started five years ago. (And people wonder who Jobs is so secretive! Apparently Apple has big news like this lying around, by the bushel as it were.)

It will take the Mac faithful a few days to digest this one, but I definitely think the economics work in Apple’s favor. If they could pull off the Mac Mini for $500 on low-volume PowerPC chips, the switch to commodity Intel CPUs will drive some serious economies of scale.

While the wait for Longhorn (now known in the biz as “Longwait”) continues, I would imagine there are a few people in Redmond sweating this one. Certainly, though, Intel is the big winner here. Now we will all be able to see what their chips can really do.