Strategic Residential Marketing

“Common Sense” was an influential revolutionary pamphlet by Thomas Paine, published in January, 1776 in Philadelphia. “Common Sense” avoided abstract philosophy, favoring instead the ordinary language of the day and utilized biblical examples to support Paine’s arguments of independence from England. 

A 1726 definition of common sense is:  “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts”.  Certainly that was valid in Thomas Paine’s time but it appears to me that common sense may have now died throughout the world.  Every day I encounter events and situations that should not occur and certainly would not have occurred years ago.  And although most evident to me within the United States, I believe that this condition, a lack of sound and prudent judgment, has grown into a worldwide pandemic impacting events both minor and major in every aspect of our lives. 

This morning when leaving the house I noticed that a local swimming pool service company had left a “hanger” on my door knob.  Apparently this was their new major advertising push.  Although I have never heard of the company and have no serious complaints with my current pool service company, I am always interested in new marketing campaigns so instead of immediately trashing the door hanger I took the time to read it.  I will leave it to you to make your own evaluation of the quality of the piece, the image of the company that it conveys and the apparent common sense of the individual that had it prepared.  I was certainly not impressed with the hanger or with the implied professionalism of the company and will not be calling them to service my pool and I wonder what the reaction was of other potential customers. 

This past week I thought that I had converted my phone and internet service to AT&T’s “U-verse”. I use the term “thought” as I had completed a phone call with their sales department on Monday.  Tuesday morning a technician first called and then came by my home to perform the necessary outside work.  However on Wednesday I received a call from AT&T’s technical department.  This service is conveniently located off-shore so that I had great difficulty in understanding the three people with whom I spoke but, from what I did understand of the conversations, the billing for my two phone lines had not been “merged” which apparently is a requirement for conversion of service. The technical department could not implement this merge and I was told that I again had to contact sales.  However, after three hours on several phone calls with numerous people which first took me around the world and finally ended up in Florida after that office was closed, and then continued for several hours the afternoon of the second day as AT&T’s phone lines were out all morning, I have no idea what is going on.  Is it any wonder that Comcast is growing at the expense of AT&T? 

BP has managed over the past few weeks to amaze the world with their total ineptitude, first in operating what was apparently an unsafe off-shore drilling facility and then being unable to stop or clean up the worst oil spill in our nation’s history.  By several estimates, the damages now exceed the total value of their company. 

Turning our attention to the homebuilding industry, I believe that the disastrous collapse of the housing market was caused primarily by a widespread lack of common sense.  Homebuilders continued to build when there was no demand; Lenders issued mortgages that had little likelihood of repayment; Wall Street issued mortgage-backed securities without underlying valid assets and FHLMC and FNMA eagerly joined in the party.  Meanwhile our government stood by doing nothing to stop the disaster apparently assuming that common sense would emerge and save the day.  As we all know, that did not happen and even the logical goal of self-preservation of the corporations that were involved and the employees whose livelihood depended on the survival of their companies failed to occur.  Read the rest of this entry »