Re:The Man Who Smuggles Trader Joe’s into Canada
by PhasmaFelis on Friday October 03, 2014 @08:55PM
(#8408417)
> I'd love to understand the business logic behind Trader Joe's response to this.
I realize this sounds silly and trollish, but my conclusion from a couple of marketing classes and years of news is that marketing people are aliens. They don't really share perceptions or value functions with the rest of the human race. The highest moral value is the good of the brand, which acquires a sort of religious significance beyond even money. Pirate Joe's doesn't hurt Trader Joe's bottom line or threaten their trademarks, but it's an insult to The Brand. That makes them angry, just like defacing a Bible makes a Christian fundamentalist angry.
This explains, for example, why businesses keep running into the Streisand Effect over and over and over and never learning. In Business Land, the only moral and rational response to threats to The Brand is to suppress them, and the only proper tool for resolving grievances is the lawsuit. It's not that they're mustache-twirling villains; they've genuinely forgotten that humans respond to censorship with moral outrage, or that it's possible to open a conversation without a legal threat.
I realize this sounds silly and trollish, but my conclusion from a couple of marketing classes and years of news is that marketing people are aliens. They don't really share perceptions or value functions with the rest of the human race. The highest moral value is the good of the brand, which acquires a sort of religious significance beyond even money. Pirate Joe's doesn't hurt Trader Joe's bottom line or threaten their trademarks, but it's an insult to The Brand. That makes them angry, just like defacing a Bible makes a Christian fundamentalist angry.
This explains, for example, why businesses keep running into the Streisand Effect over and over and over and never learning. In Business Land, the only moral and rational response to threats to The Brand is to suppress them, and the only proper tool for resolving grievances is the lawsuit. It's not that they're mustache-twirling villains; they've genuinely forgotten that humans respond to censorship with moral outrage, or that it's possible to open a conversation without a legal threat.