I assume you know this story:
There once was a shepherd boy who was bored as he sat on the hillside watching the village sheep. To amuse himself he took a great breath and sang out, “Wolf! Wolf! The Wolf is chasing the sheep!”
image courtesy – https://howlingforjustice.wordpress.com/category/wolf-delisting-lawsuit/
The villagers came running up the hill to help the boy drive the wolf away. But when they arrived at the top of the hill, they found no wolf. The boy laughed at the sight of their angry faces.
“Don’t cry ‘wolf’, shepherd boy”, said the villagers, “when there’s no wolf!” They went grumbling back down the hill.
Later, the boy sang out again, “Wolf! Wolf! The wolf is chasing the sheep!” To his naughty delight, he watched the villagers run up the hill to help him drive the wolf away.
When the villagers saw no wolf they sternly said, “Save your frightened song for when there is really something wrong! Don’t cry ‘wolf’ when there is NO wolf!”
But the boy just grinned and watched them go grumbling down the hill once more.
Later, he saw a REAL wolf prowling about his flock. Alarmed, he leaped to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could, “Wolf! Wolf!”
But the villagers thought he was trying to fool them again, and so they didn’t come.
At sunset, everyone wondered why the shepherd boy hadn’t returned to the village with their sheep. They went up the hill to find the boy. They found him weeping.
“There really was a wolf here! The flock has scattered! I cried out, ‘Wolf!’ Why didn’t you come?”
An old man tried to comfort the boy as they walked back to the village.
“We’ll help you look for the lost sheep in the morning”, he said, putting his arm around the youth, “Nobody believes a liar … even when he is telling the truth!”
**
Now consider the e-mails that pepperfry.com sends me EVERYDAY:
Everyday is the LAST day on pepperfry.com!
Everyday is the LAST opportunity to get a good deal on the site!!
If the pepperfry.com management were in the fortune-telling business, then everyday the earth would have stopped spinning, the moon would have stopped shining, the dogs would have stopped barking and the toilets would have stopped flushing – UNLESS we bought something from their site!
Jokes aside, this is my moot point:
– Why don’t serious, well educated brand owners UNDERSTAND that they cannot keep sending me the SAME SICK message everyday and expect me to believe it?
Insight – celebrate your birthday ONCE a year. If you tell everyone it’s your birthday EVERYDAY, then you will get a slap instead of a present.
Extrapolation of message – promotions and offers work best when they are once and far-between.
– USE YOUR HEAD to drive sales, rather than discounts!!!
Sure, consumers LOVE the smell of discounts and price-off’s, but is that SERIOUS BUSINESS?
Is that what you want to be building as a business model?
Do the world’s biggest businesses do this?? Is this the way great BRANDS are built?
Note – Louis Vuitton NEVER does a sale. It destroys its old bags but never sells them at a discount
– Why the hurry?
Why should everything end today?
What’s the rush?
Why the doomsday warning?
Do people buy rugs and beds and carpets and cushion covers when a gun is pointed to their heads?
Lesson – why go against common sense? Why not build a story on the great products you are selling and the benefits of the products RATHER THAN selling as it as ONLY being available in the next 23.776 minutes??
– DESPERATION STINKS
You know what I see and smell in this communication?
Desperation! (maybe the investors are really desperate!!)
Everything seems to be ‘OMG’ in the communication.
Lesson – Desperation never works. Never will.
NEVER build a business, a brand and a career in a hurry. Or in desperation.
*****
Varun Wahi
This sounds like Linkedin’s mail with the subject line ‘
Last day to get a free trial of Job Seeker Premium!’
This mail has been sent to me thrice in the past one month. 🙂
Abhishek Bharadwaj
Me too a regular victim. I am actually planning to send an email ‘Hurry! 100 % Discount in next 24 Hours’ to Every Who and Who of one of the E-commerce Stores :-))
Tit for Tat !!
Vijay Khubchandani
So very Apt, but also so seldom Understood..
Vinay Chhoda
I think you should email them the link to your 10x10x10 post…
Khizar
Quite a coincidence that today during noon I was discussing the same with my dad an the dual shock was mention of pepperfry which was one of the main point of discussion.
These big ecommerce players have spent huge amount of cash in getting eyeballs and now want the same customer to buy stuff no matter what may come. So there is a huge amount of discount or sale on every occasion. This is effecting the industry as a whole.
This also reminds me of an article shared by Mahesh https://techcircle.vccircle.com/500/13-potential-e-commerce-mas-to-watch-out-for-in-2013-in-india/ –
I totally agree to the point that Desperation never works and never will.
Brand should have a value, a value which is well appreciated.
Nirvanatshirts – Get Liberated
Anirudh B Balotiaa
Seriously this is heights of desperation…I get mails from Myntra DAILY about last day for discounts…
Turning out to be a nightmare of mails once we shop from these sites…
asha chaudhry
alok,
what was today’s LAST DAY offer???
am curious to know after this post have they stopped spamming you….?
Pawan Deokule
The timing of this post is impeccable for me!
At digicat we handle a client who uses our services for bulk email and we were just selling them the concept of a ‘governor’ or email frequency regulator to make sure that the frequency at which we touch each customer should be governed by the reponse to your emails from that particular recipient.
This helps maintain belief inthe subejct lines and our A/B tests work better with more truthful results. In fact we would have customers waiting for the next email and would miss us when they do not see our email!
This post explains the aftermath of poor bulk email governance. In a digital world it is highly impactful to listen to your audience and change your behaviour! Hope for pepperfry’s sake they take the cue from this post.
Atul Agarwal
Something is really wrong at Pepperfry. I just clicked an ad which took me to the below link-
https://stagefry.pepperfry.com/black-fastrack-sunglasses-p095bk1-106304.html?utm_campaign=vizury&utm_content=33962182281
So Pepperfry is paying Vizury (I guess 8-10 Rs. per click) for getting traffic to their staging website! Moreover once page opens it would say Could Not Connect! Utter waste of VC money!
Shahnawaz Khan
Very valid points raised here and it seems that this is the situation with almost every e-com out there (at least from the ones where I have registered/bought from) — zansaar, jabong, 99labels, yebhi, snapdeal etc
Every day, quite some time is spent sending such messages to the junk box. Why don’t they realize that I will buy when I want and not when they force me — by sending such messages.
IIRC, someone out there created an email widget that you could install and all such messages (e-com/sale) would move to a specified folder. Need to try that out now.
Anant Mendiratta
Yeah i agree to all what you said. The thing is a little like that some of the heavily funded players have made deals a normal affair – which has become a big pain for us (the ones with bootstrapped startups). Customers tend to get discounts so easily in the name customer acquisition that we’ve a reached a stage where people don’t buy a product until and unless it is discounted to some extent…However, knowing this – we’ve learned to prosper in such an ecosystem, it has helped us to think about our differentiation and find ways to sell profitably on an ecosystem of razor thin margins.
I have always believed that “Solving a problem with money is a little like not solving the problem at all”. and this is what i feel the heavily funded players need to understand.
congratulations on this great post. i second you on all your thoughts. 🙂