Subject:
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Re: S&H Technic Sale via MindStorms e-mailing
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Thu, 16 Dec 1999 16:12:59 GMT
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Viewed:
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145 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> In lugnet.admin.general, Jeff Thompson writes:
> > They don't say they can't be, either.
>
> Of course, it's still bad netiquette to post email without permission, even
> from a company, IMHO. I suppose you could paraphrase it.
I agree that personal person-to-person email [1] should never
be posted (or even mentioned the vast majority of time) or
forwarded without permission.
Unsolicited (or barely solicited) commercial advertisements
I view as the equivalent of physical junk mail. I don't feel
obliged to treat it with the same respect of confidentiality.
That's not an absolute, though.
My opinion could be mitigated by how the list of addresses
was gathered, and upon the limits of the supply of the item
in question. If there was something that was in very limited
supply (say they found a cache of 100 old forestmen 6071 sets),
and LEGO decided that the members of their hypothetical Castle
LEGO fan club should have first crack at them, so they mailed out
100 advertisements ... and someone posted that advertisement
on LUGNET, and immediately an enterprising AFOL bought the
entire supply and then started reselling them for a profit ...
yeah, I would think that really stunk.
But I'd also think it sad if only 10 people responded to that
ad, and the other 90 sets were shipped off to be sold at
MacFrugal stores (largely falling out of the AFOL community's
hands) or pieced out to serve as fodder for a building
competition.
I do feel like the people who went to the trouble of doing
whatever-they-did to get on that mailing list should have
first crack at the specials offered. Perhaps waiting a few
days before mentioning an email like that would be good and
proper form.
> Not necessarily. In this case, the advertisement seemed to be intended for
> a wide audience, but in the case of specially targeted advertisements (part
> of this whole new "one-to-one marketing" revolution), customers who have
> been identified as price-sensitive are sometimes given breaks where others
> are not. (This has nothing to do with TLC in particular and I don't know if
> TLC does it or not, but it's a basic marketing and sales technique. You
> price something at some point and then price give breaks when and if you
> have to in order to make more sales. But you don't want price breaks going
> to people who aren't price-sensitive. Another form of this philosophy is
> slight product variations, for example a $200 inkjet printer that prints
> 6 ppm, and the deluxe $300 version that prints 8 ppm. The only difference
> inside is a timing chip that says how fast to turn the motors, but you can
> sell the same product to two different types of customers at different
> prices.)
Sure, I get that. We do that in software licensing (e.g.
shareware) all the time - the functionality is there, it
just isn't enabled until you pay the fee and enter the code.
I'll have to think about how that applies to marketing, and how
broader dispersion of an advertisement could negatively effect
a company. If you're giving one customer a price break on something,
you might not necessarily want to give all your customers the same
break. I can see that. Not sure how I see this particular
incident (or, indeed, Shop At Home specials) in that light.
I'll just go with nodding my head in agreement at your "not
necessarily" addendum to my comment. It's not black and white.
--
jthompson@esker.com "Float on a river, forever and ever, Emily"
>
> --Todd
[1] caveat - of a non-threatening nature - abusive mail is another
matter. death threats are another matter entirely.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: S&H Technic Sale via MindStorms e-mailing
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| (...) Of course, it's still bad netiquette to post email without permission, even from a company, IMHO. I suppose you could paraphrase it. (...) Not necessarily. In this case, the advertisement seemed to be intended for a wide audience, but in the (...) (25 years ago, 16-Dec-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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