Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Marketing Stooge

So late yesterday I had a close encounter of the marketing kind. Dilbert may make fun of marketing departments (and I know I've had more than my share of run-ins with our marketing department/efforts), but yesterday was a whole new level. To protect the innocent, no identifying details will be provided...

On Friday, I got an e-mail from someone at a company saying that one of our sales guys suggested she talk to me about the international radio marketplace (scarily enough, I'm some sort of an authority). On Monday, we chatted for about 90 minutes and I'm not sure if I helped or hurt. Basically her company is looking to reënter a certain segment of the marketplace and she is trying to develop a segmentation strategy, identify growth drivers, and map out other factors that will play a role in this effort. I can generally parse legalese and I understand marketese when it comes to stripping hype from press releases, but this conversation seemed to be full of MBA-atitis or something. A lot of the time, I think we were talking about totally different things; I'm not sure how much was attributable to her tying to get up to speed on the market in question and how much of it was me making assumptions about base-level knowledge -- or maybe it was a matter of coming at things from totally different angles -- but I think the follow up e-mails are going to be an interesting exercise in each of us trying to figure out what the hell the other is talking about...

The weather has gotten a bit more normal after the spring of constant rain, but the garden is still lagging behind where it should be. It looks like two of the squash maybe starting to produce at least a few gourds, but the cucumbers are going nowhere and the tomatoes are getting taller but no sign of fruit. We did get the first raspberry out of the patch last night. It could have spent another day or two on the cane, but by then a bird would have gotten it; even if it was a little early, the flavor was exquisite.

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