Never Let Your Business Grow Up to Be Stupid
I don’t particularly like the word “stupid.” It’s the kind of thing I spend all day encouraging my kids not to say, and I think there is already plenty of negativity in the world.
But in this case, it’s warranted.
I have a massive following on social media for my Improve Photography website. We have well over 350,000 followers and just the Facebook page is adding over 1,000 new followers every single day. So for companies that want to market to photographers, it’s a gold mine.
I have been working on a resource for my audience to show them how to build a photoblog using wordpress. Most of them either want to redesign their website or want to launch one to show off their photography. The trouble I’ve had with starting this resource is that I couldn’t find a great WordPress theme for them that would be 100% trouble free, easy, and look great.
I found a theme this week that I really liked the looks of. I wanted to give it a spin and see if it was something I could recommend to my audience. So, I wrote the following email to the company:
In response to this GOLDEN opportunity, I received the following response from the company:
The affiliate program that he referred to? It pays a whopping $7 commission on a product that costs between $199 and $279. For those of you who are new to affiliate marketing, a commission on a similar product would normally be at least $70.
What’s the lesson to be learned?
You decide. I’d love to read what you have to say in a comment below.
For me, though, the lesson is that if your business ever grows to the point that you have anyone handling customer service for you, you absolutely MUST give that person carta blanche to make no-brainer decisions.
Even if you dislike the word, stupid fits here. Who wouldn’t want their product possibly in front of that many people?
Other than my camera almost everything else I have gotten from your recommendations
Obviously they are not in a competitive market and they don’t treat marketing with respect. I don’t see how this will work in THEIR favor.
This is the most costly mistake that business all across America and the Corporate spectrum makes time and time again. Especially in Retail there is a CUSTOMER SERVICE CRISIS. Management of Companies no longer have the depth in employee experience to understand that there is a great return in great customer service. All of the corporations and retailers have forgotten that they work for the customer. Instead guess what they work for? They work for the computer. Yes I said the computer! Management rarely comes down from the Ivory Tower and instead looks at reports and reports and more reports and reports about reports and then has endless meetings about the reports where everyone is tasked to give a new report on the subject. Managers at the store/ customer level have to enter computer data and report on & on to perpetuate this endless cycle of computer data ect. This traps them and keeps them away from both their customers and their employees. Everyone just emails and enters endless tracking data to each other so that now we have a society that is out of touch at all levels. Sigh!
This is a fair assessment. That’s the premise behind the whole Undercover Boss show. In most cases, upper management of consumer-facing companies is pretty oblivious to what’s happening at the customer level.
I am so grateful for your post.Really thank you! Cool.