I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes.

There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey.

If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question?

[1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"

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deaux an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Too many layers and competing interests. The person who ends up creating the survey realistically cares much more about going home 1 minute earlier or with 1% less neural energy spent. They've got their kids to manage when they get home.

Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually don't last long as business owners though.

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getnormality an hour ago | parent [-]

That's precisely what I'm wondering about now.

Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?

I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.

Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.

	▲	pwatsonwailes an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it. As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things: 1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you. 2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of. Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.
	▲	deaux an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it's very often repeated that the hardest thing about growing a business is keeping the culture, and it's simply impossible past a certain size unless you literally develop a cult of personality like Jobs or to a lesser extent Musk. Extremely few manage to do it. And when the culture goes, that's what you get: least effort. And the least effort is to do what you're saying, "just do more of the same, but bigger, or with a hint of chocolate". At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.

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pwatsonwailes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question"

There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.

Like, a lot.