Category: Life

Brand Experience, branding, Life

The truth about Paypal – Can you really trust them?

We all love Paypal don’t we? They are friendly, quirky, simple and make all of our lives easier. The ad says so.

Or so they claim.

As a seller they have a brilliant seller protection programme, that protects you from chargebacks. So far so good.Paypal Seller protection Programme

But it happened to me on my data business that I recently sold. A person in the US paid £799 for a copy of my full business database, added all of the checks and balances required to pay with a credit card online. My system sent them the email with the download code and they duly downloaded it – even to the area of the city the card was registered in.

And two hours later they started a claim for a chargeback.

It’s okay i’m protected by Paypal’s first class cheeky, chirpy seller protection programme aren’t I?

But no. I’m not. Because I didn’t POST them a disk with the data on it.

So Paypal, a business that has grown entirely to serve the digital economy in which we trade, does not protect sales of items that can be paid for and transferred digitally.

It’s all clearly explained in paragraph 11.6 on page 12 of their 31 page terms and conditions that we’ve all read. Right?

Paypal Seller protection is worthless shit

 

How can they get away with it?

Well, apparently as the goods I sold weren’t ‘tangible’ they had no value.

Any brand that has a truth which is that far from a users reality will soon get found out. It’s an untrustworthy, rotten way to do business.

So be warned. If you are selling a service, a download a digital file or anything that won’t go in a good old fashioned letter box, then maybe Paypal isn’t for you. I’m not using them for my next business, I think i’ll give Sage Pay a try instead.

 

branding, Life

The ‘Unconscious Uncoupling’ of Grass Roots Football

Grass roots footbal in decline in the UK

I coached kids football for five or so years with my mate who was one of the other parents. Together, we took our team to win their league at Under 12’s. It was quite a proud moment.

The reason I stopped was that in that same season I had a genuine death threat from an opposition parent (who our team had beaten) which was a little unsettling to say the least. It’s kids football, it’s not really that important is it?

But football is now in general decline at grass roots level for exactly that reason. The fun has gone and for many parents it’s a desperate chance for a ticket out of poverty. Winning is everything and if their son or daughter is the next big thing, they’re made for life. Statistically, football is the sport that it’s easiest to get rich at. Assuming the top two leagues are generally pretty wealthy, then you have around 500+ players earning mega money in the UK alone. Add in the other European Leagues and the rising Far East markets, and it’s comparatively easy. In golf or tennis, this may only be the top 50-100 in the world.

But this week, Sport England announced it has cut FA funding by £1.6m after a grassroots decline. Football is in trouble. Never before has the professional game been so completely disconnected to the grass roots game. Unless they address this, the game will just slowly wither and die. There won’t be the players coming through to feed the national teams and there may not be those growing up with football as part of their life as were were.

So, the solution?

Simple for me.

1. Make football fun again. Don’t play competitive football until they get well into their teens. Kids want to play football with their friends, they don’t care whether they win or lose, It’s the parents who do. They’ll play their competitive games in the playground anyway, without their parents screaming at them and taking the fun away.

2. Build respect into the game from the outset. The FA are now attempting to teach this to the kids, but they need to keep the parents away as normally that’s where the problems lie.

3. Keep the game sizes small so all the kids get lots of time on the ball to raise their overall skill levels. The more they play the more they will improve and in theory the more they should want to play.

4. Stop players in the professional game from swearing on the pitch and saying anything AT ALL to the referee. Look at rugby for a model here. It’s flawless and everyone calls the referee ‘Sir’ as they have ultimate power on the pitch and off it.

I don’t really care about England games anymore, I’m not even that bothered about the Premiership. I’ll always be an Oxford fan, but my love for the game and more importantly, it’s future as a national sport is in jeopardy unless they change the way the game is played at the very bottom of the footballing pyramid.

ps, Thanks to Ruby Lyle for the image of Charlie G.

Life, Social media

How to write a complaint letter

True story, real incident, genuine letter, brilliant response.

Brilliant Complaint letter

Brand Experience, brand values, branding, Life, Social media

A bit of a problem for the Abercrombie and Fitch brand

When you set out to create a brand you can design in certain criteria. By pricing it high, you exclude certain buying groups, by not even making XL sizes for women, you naturally exclude the larger ladies. They also place ‘beautiful people’ in a state of undress outside their stores as greeters. These decisions form the basis of the whole brand and who you target and appeal to. I am far to old/fat to be in their target audience (but so is their own MD!) and I am now quite proud to say I have never owned any of their products.

Mike Jeffries Abercrombie and Fitch Managing Director
Mike Jeffries Abercrombie and Fitch Managing Director – looking a little like a bad advertisement for facial surgery – and certainly not in his own target audience

But Abercrombie and Fitch have taken this brand separation to a new level by destroying all damaged or returned goods rather than giving them to the homeless, as many other brands do. All very deliberate and all very elitist. the assumption being that seeing homeless people in A&F would embarrass their own beautiful customers.

But here comes the brand backlash. 7.5 million views in less than a month, and growing fast. Watch this space. It may be the next Gerald Ratner moment for the A&F brand.

Life

Is this really a Brave New World?

Sorry this is nothing to do with branding. It’s bigger than that.

The NRA have come out today and said the massacre in Newtown which saw 20 innocent children and six innocent adults murdered by a lunatic gunman (that I refuse to name and feed his publicity fetish) could have been prevented if the teachers had been armed.

How can it be right that it is seen as the right way to bring up children to have them cowering behind high wire, prison style fences with armed guards for teachers. How can it be right that children in a supposedly civilised society have to practice for the chance that a gunman could come to their school, like we practiced fire drills.

In the book Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932, he predicted that life in AD 2540 would be characterised by a few things.

People would live in protected communities and so out of their heads on Soma (their tranquiliser) that their life would be an idle and pointless one. They would grow fat and lazy and be de-sensitised to death whilst being bought up to be scared of the ‘Savages’ who lived in the Reservation. Effectively, these savages are us, you and me, normal people, living normal lives with love, passion and compassion for others around us.

The answer to gunmen being both inclined and able to wander into schools murdering people isn’t just about banning guns, it’s about changing the culture of an entire society that is built on the right to bear arms, which gives anyone carte blanche to able to get their own back on people or society by blowing them away.

In my Reservation, that I’d live in, people could have guns, but keep them locked away at gun clubs. No-one would be allowed military spec assault rifles – apart from the military and even then only in training or in war. People with mental illness would be cared for and wouldn’t have access to guns at all – let alone over 500 rounds of ammunition. Ever. Full stop.

We are heading for Huxley’s Brave New World and without a generational change in attitude, we will get there a long way before 2540.

Please share this if you want us to live normal lives as normal people and give our children a chance to grow up in a society that you’d like to live in yourself.