OK, everybody in Canada knows we pay some of the highest cell phone fees in the world. Our government has even gone so far as to pass legislation to reduce these levels of parasitic extortion (a superficial ploy to appease the weary consumer vote that has actually resulted in HIGHER mobile bills… but I digress)
The point is, NOBODY in Canada is happy to receive their monthly shakedown from the Big Three. So when I got my ROGERS bill in the email box this month, something in me snapped.
“YOUR ONLINE BILL IS READY” it screams, in all-caps-text-shout. And look – here is a happy photo of a girl demonstrating your proper response as a consumer of our Most Magnificent Services. Open your computer! Sigh with contentment! Click the ‘Pay Now’ button! OH JOY!!!
Really, ROGERS? Do you think your customers are all drooling idiots?
The way I see it, there are two reasons for this waste of my criminally overpriced bandwidth:
A) This the result of some thoroughly-researched and tested ROGERS Evil Customer Subordination Plan™ that has found corporate male customers over the age of 50 will be so enchanted by a young professional female with intelligent-looking glasses, we won’t even feel ROGERS reaching for our wallets. (Presumably women, and men who identify as gay, will receive a square-jawed male version of the image, with just enough smoulder in his gaze to let them know he could be a bad boy in the right circumstances)
B) Image selection for customer e-mails has been handed off to a design division that has neither the time nor the initiative to go beyond the first page of stock photo results for “happy technology consumer”
Frankly, I’m not sure which is more insulting.
But, as we here at Green Briefs and Unicycle Creative are all about solutions, let’s look at the 90% of this glass that is not full yet. What could ROGERS do with this opportunity?
How about helping some people out with this valuable space? Scrolling down to the very bottom of my ‘MyROGERS’ page, I found a musty, cobweb-encrusted link for The ROGERS Youth Fund. It’s a worthy-looking initiative that helps support a wide variety of groups across the country.
What if this valuable space were offered to groups within the program to help profile their initiatives and share some of their stories? Would this be too confusing for bill-payers? Would it look too much like a calculated corporate softening of the wireless payment pain? I don’t know. Perhaps some Evil marketing Bot™ could make that prediction.
But for my money, it would be a whole lot better than a corporate photo model smirking at my stupidity for being just another helpless Canadian wireless consumer.
What do you think?
PS. No offense intended to the woman who innocently posed for the original ROGERS photo, stock or otherwise. You are, in all likelihood, a very nice person. The stupidity originates with the network.
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