Home again, home again. Sorry about the sporadic posts. That comes with spending most of my time with relatives and forgetting to either bring the laptop or ask for the WEP key. Still, while visiting with said relatives, i did happen upon an interesting example of something that's endlessly bugged me.
We were at a Dunkin' Donuts (sorry, the local mama-san & pop-san donut shop is leagues better than Duncan), i noticed a rack of coffee you can take home, along with "Dunkin' Donuts Retail Merchandise". This week, it appeared to be tea, but there stood a rack, directly aimed at customers proudly proclaiming multiple selling opportunities for "Dunkin' Donuts Retail Merchandise".
i tend to rail against things like focus groups and consumer studies, but honestly, could they come up a worse name? Why not "Dunkin' Donut's Stuff" or heck, leave off the front labels and just add a sticker in the back for the slower employees? The problem here is that they named something that's perfectly logical from the point of view of someone familiar with the process of retail sales and marketing, not from the point of view of folks that eat donuts and drink coffee.
Fact is, i see that stuff all the time. Folks, whether by intention or not, have a really bad habit of thinking that everyone else thinks like they do. Here's another example. Let's say you've got a desktop system. If i ask you to point at the computer, which part would you point to? Which part would a cattleman from Muncie point to? What's the overall likelihood that both of you would agree that the large black box is the computer and not the keyboard or monitor?
While asking 50 people a series of 20 questions about cheese while they're hooked up to pinging heart rate monitors is probably a tad excessive, i'll admit that asking someone from outside what you ought to call something is a pretty good idea. i'm actually thinking that perhaps there's a burgeoning market for on-call six year olds to provide that sort of thing.
Which will probably go toward explaining my next start up, an interactive social networking system that uses dynamic heuristics to determine relative interpersonal values: "Mr. Bubblepants".
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We don't have Duncan Donuts stores in my area but carry their coffee in our supermarkets and the like. Maybe they were using just the sort of bland, corporate-driven buzzwords that would hook a traveling distibution exec.
Let me know when Mr. Bubbblepants is in beta.