:: Ire inc. ::

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

I just received an annoying b.s. email from one of my credit card providers. It's pure marketing fluff, with no discernable value, the kind of email that I've been trained so hard to ignore that, once I'd gotten sufficiently worked up and decided to see exactly why it was so important to send it my way, I had to attenuate with all my might to even process it. The more I read, the angrier I got. I'm not sure why. I'd finished dinner and I was sated. I'd read through all my RSS feeds for the day, and I even had an hour or so to spare before adjourning to my private mausoleum to cleanse myself in goat's blood and engage in ethereal communion with the undead.

I shouldn't have to describe to anyone why this email upset me. It was a list of advertisements thinly cloaked as special offers / news items, as well as some well-calculated "tips" (deserving of their "quotation marks of ironic condescension") whose only purpose was to drive increased usage of a credit card I already over-use.

But this isn't my point. What really frustrated me is that there's no one to blame. This marketing campaign, this freaking "touchpoint" between me and my trusty creditor, is the aggregate result of years of minute decisions by dozens if not hundreds of people, each acting as they thought best, with little or no desire to pick on me. Yet taken as a whole, it resulted in one very upset customer, and completely sabotaged the intended result.

Now I'm not saying they should stop this program. Most people likely did not react in the same way I did, and overall it might have been quite successful. Even if there was one person I could contact and flip out on (which I probably wouldn't do anyway) one customer's aberrant emotional response, however disturbing, might not justify the cancellation of any otherwise beneficial campaign. But there isn't - I can't respond to the one person who did this, because it wasn't just one person. And I can't respond effectively to one group, because, even assuming I could somehow penetrate the corporate-relations wall, those I perceive to have wronged me are spread across departments, physical offices, and even points in time. My ultimate recourse as a customer is to cease to retain their services. I fear however that, given the scale of the offending party, my reason for doing so, even if explicitly expressed, will not be accurately recognized and thus fail to be addressed.

Large organizations function as distributed blame networks, responsibility dispersal systems diffusing culpability until any one employee's part is below some satisfactory threshold. That's one of the chief reasons for forming a corporation: to protect the agents within a company from any legal retribution stemming from actions taken by that company. The law rightfully recognizes that the collective decision-making of many is not the same as that of a single individual, and places the blame accordingly on the organization. Only in the rarest of circumstances is that indemnification challenged (see "Piercing the Corporate Veil"). It's an imperfect system, but it works.

Therefore, when you become incensed at a corporation, when you feel like pointing fingers, you are not targeting anything tangible. Your anger and actions are directed at a weird, nebulous concept of a thing, a corporeally abstract but legally well-defined entity. And while the officers of these entities - those most frequently receiving shame and admonishment - may be their public faces, there are operational aspects, such as sending out a mass email, in which they have a trivial hand and for which they are not at fault.

So I am left with a very bitter, disempowered taste in my mouth. Blaming a corporation for something this venial is as futile as blaming fate itself, though involving better branding and a sparse chance of winning a class-action lawsuit.

Posted by morland @ 12:01 AM

:: Comments ::

Thanks. Well put. Yes, The Man sucks. Yes, corporate control over America sucks. But college-sophomore-style bitching about the CEO of these companies, or, worse, all x thousand employees of the company isn't accurate or helpful. Market research, targeted advertising, telemarketing, spammy e-mails disguised as "tips" are all deeply ingrained in our country's business practices. So how to work on our country's business practices? That I don't know.

Posted by: Underwear on May 25, 2004 11:12 AM

I think for the most part CEOs are amazingly smart, ethical people who are less prone to making mistakes than your average employee and are compensated accordingly. I also think the average employee isn't malicious or unthinking. My complaint is that everyone involved in the whole process bears so little individual responsibility and/or works on such a small component that annoyances and inefficiencies just tend to snowball because there's no one in a position to handle all the details from start to finish - in fact no one could be capable of doing so, due to the sheer scale of most modern long-term projects like these marketing campaigns. The point is that it's a systemic problem, not that the people involved are evil.

Posted by: morland on May 25, 2004 11:34 AM

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