Marketing Is A Weird Place For Reverse Psychology

I worked for a wireless ISP in 2001 that spent a ton of money with an outside marketing firm to “rebrand” our company and design a website for us. When they delivered the product, the first page that loaded was a 500k flash file that couldn’t be skipped.

When we asked about people on dial-up (lots in 2001), engineering was told:

Marketing: “That’s not our target market.”

Hmmm, were they trying to get customers to move from cable and DSL to a slower service that had a small mobile footprint? The entire engineering department just sat there and laughed. 

That was also the moment when I realized that people in Marketing have no idea about anything at all.

My Manager: “Next time, we’ll just shave an orangutan and call them a marketing executive. Then at least we could pay them in bananas.”