Enthusiasm For The Boring Stuff, Part 1 (it's the time and place, stupid)

One of the things friends have often said when I've bounced all this Enthusiasm Economy stuff off of them is, "Sure, it'll work for Apple or Porsche, but what about the stuff nobody gives a s--t about? How do you make it work for toilet bowl cleaner and kitty litter and other boring crap like that?" (Hmm, there seems to be a scatological undercurrent to this question.)

Buzz Machine has a post about this that suggests a killer app for RSS-- pushing a list of this week's specials at your local grocery store to subscribers.

This is a perfect example of how to take a mundane, usually ignored form of advertising and make it relevant to the user's life by the simple expedient of being smart about the time and place in which it is delivered. Deliver the list to me quietly, let me consult it when I'm shopping or getting ready to and it's exactly the sort of information I might find useful enough that I would sign up for it. Needless to say, the stores which I'm signed up for would pretty quickly become the only stores I shop at-- anybody else would fall off my consideration list just because I didn't know what I'd find there before even leaving the house.

So here's Enthusiasm Marketing For The Boring Stuff: give me the ability to conduct the entire interaction with your marketing on my own terms. Let me use it in my way (instead of you shoving it in my face), and I'll give it exactly as much attention as I need to to make a purchase.

Now compare that type of transaction with something that the Jewel stores in Chicago have actually done to combat the increasing invisibility of their mass media advertising. At the checkout, they tape up a little poster for a featured item of the week-- something they're no doubt being paid to promote, as it's usually the most artificially flavored and genetically modified sort of big brand pseudo-food imaginable. As I check out, I'm always asked in a mumbling monotone, "You innarested inna feachud item uddaweek?" Of course, the odds that I'm going to be attracted by this one item are low to begin with, and the odds that I want to turn around, when I'm almost done with shopping and out the door, and spend another five minutes at Jewel hunting for Tropical Tornado Froot Snax Shooterz are even lower. (They must have somebody fetch it for you, or something-- they can't really make everyone else in line behind me wait while I go look for it, can they?)

The difference between the totally customer-focused idea of RSS weekly specials and the totally store-focused idea of trying to force one last impulse purchase on me on my way out the door could hardly be greater. One is a smart strategic way to build sales and loyalty at the same time by serving the customer on his own terms; the other is just annoying and, hopefully, as fruitless as Froot Snax Shooterz.

(But notice that the post says "Ask your wife if she'd subscribe." Ahem, some of us Free Agent Nation types-slash-shoppers are not wives, you know...)