Marketing Fail

January 24, 2009 01:04 AM

I'm feeling rather smug right now.

My sister IM'd me with news that she might have an interview lined up. She'd missed the lady's call, but had left and message and would try to get up with them next week. This is a good thing, as my sister is currently serving at a restaurant but would really like to get out and put her degree to good use (English/theater, just in case anyone's curious).

Turns out, the company in question was a local sales and marketing company. Now, this intrigued me, as a few years ago I worked as a programmer at a web marketing company in Knoxville, who in turn worked with a couple of advertising and marketing companies in Knoxville. So my concept of the term "sales and marketing company" had been set pretty high. I assumed that this company performed some sort of business-to-business service, like advertising or helping companies present and promote themselves to other companies. (They called their technique "face-to-face marketing," and I was trying to figure out what that would mean for a company that gets hired out by other companies to do marketing for them.)

Funny thing, they apparently knew nothing about marketing. I mean, why would you claim to work with Fortune 500 companies and yet not showcase your portfolio or clients? Why would your contact page be completely focused on getting resumes? Why would four out of five of your FAQs be focused on hiring new employees rather than, you know, what your company actually does?

It didn't take long before we figured out this was some sort of multi-level sales scheme. Their "Training" page (that's training they provide to employees, not training they sell as a service) hinted at this in only the vaguest terms, preferring to use terms like "managers" and "marketing officers" and "coaching your team." Of course it became blatantly obvious when my sister searched for the president's name, only to end up on a different company's site that, oddly enough, had the exact same content. (Apparently, this was where the president began his amazing explosive omgwtfbbq!!!111oneoneoneeleven growth opportunity.)

Anyway, I won't name names. But I was surprised how obvious they were once I actually started looking for what the company did. Or rather, they weren't obvious about what they did, which made them obvious. I actually felt like sort of a jerk at first, since I went into paranoid skeptic mode all over this nice shiny new opportunity. And I think she was a little disappointed, since (prior to this revelation, of course) it was a real interview. At the same time, I reassured her that she should feel good. We just outsmarted their attempt to fool her into a job she doesn't want.

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