As we go decade by decade deeper into the digital age, annoyances rise and fall, old ones soon replaced by newer ones.
In the 1990s, newly acquired cellphones going off loudly in restaurants drove me nearly crazy. What kept me sane — and civil — was realizing that people were adapting to a new technology and would soon create new rules for conduct. And they did, within a year or two.
Similarly, for several years pop-up ads were the scourge of browsing, until blockers became standard.
The latest annoyance came to my attention last weekend, when I was browsing the internet for a new leather couch and a laptop.
I ventured to one of the major vendor's websites to shop for the laptop and was immediately offered a $100 discount for creating an account, which I did. For the next two days, I was deluged with emails from said vendor every few hours, until I tired of it and unsubscribed.
The couch-buying experience online was exasperating in its own way. While combing the websites of the several major regional furniture chains, nearly every link I clicked on generated a new bot, offering me specials, asking if I wanted to converse with the bot, etc. When I attempted to close the bot's window, I was usually thrown back to the website's homepage, and forced to click back through the menu to the page I'd been viewing. This occurred repeatedly.
Now, I work in the business-to-business-to-consumer space, as an executive recruiter and consultant. I understand the pressure on marketers to raise response rates and turn prospects into customers. But there is a fundamental disconnect in their behavior.
As I read in a blog post recently on a software-as-a-service marketing site, it is critical that marketers distinguish between prospects who are in educational mode vs. buying mode.
