Philywebrider opened this issue on Jul 26, 2009 · 52 posts
bagginsbill posted Thu, 30 July 2009 at 8:18 PM
I am CTO of a company that makes interactive self-service kiosks and digital signage.
We often have discussions where it becomes clear how dangerous it is to make marketing decisions based on personal preference - how wrong it is to project your own belief systems onto the population at large, and conclude what will work or not work from that.
For example, I do not understand why some people go to AAA to pay their car insurance in person, in cash. I would never do that. I pay online, click click. But thousands of people do it every day. So we made a bill-pay kiosk for AAA, so that AAA did not have to have so many customer service reps. Now the weird people who are not like me can still walk into AAA with a fistful of cash, but they feed it into a machine. Lines are shorter, customer service reps are free to walk about and help out and chat with the customers about the weather. Fewer customer service reps are needed, so AAA saves money. Everybody is happy.
This makes no sense to me, and if I were foolish, I would judge it to be a preposterously stupid idea to buy such kiosks. But that would be a flawed analysis. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your preferences turn into recipes for more revenue, or that your opposition to some behavior or process proves the business model is doomed.
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