Exceptions May Apply*

Three of the rules they don’t teach you in business school are:

• Don’t irritate, insult, or bamboozle your customers;

• Don’t assume your customers are too dumb to notice if you do try to bamboozle them;

• Don’t assume that no matter what you do to them, your customers will forever pledge their loyalty to you, standing by your products or services even as they are bombarded with attractive alternatives.

I suppose the reason they don’t teach these things is because they assume anyone with a brain would take them for granted. How wrong they are! Permit me to cite a few examples.

A decade or two ago, some brilliant engineer figured out how to speed up audio recordings without having voices sound like chipmunks. The technology was touted as having all kinds of helpful, even important, applications. I, for one, envisioned requiring all clergy to record their sermons and homilies rather than delivering them live, thereby enabling us to get a 30-minute sermon in 12 minutes—at a pace that would virtually eliminate dozing. Alas, it was not to be, nor am I aware of any other important applications.

Except one.

Radio commercials have been transformed. Now an advertiser can use 55 seconds of a one-minute commercial to sell, embellish, and exaggerate to his or her heart’s content, then turn up the speed dial and cram into the last five seconds all the full disclosure, negative side effects, limitations, and caveats required either by law or—heaven forbid—conscience. Absolutely no one could even begin to understand a single word of that full disclosure material—like, “This offer expires at midnight,” or whatever.

Advertisers who use this technique, and there are lots of them, are not only skirting the laws or regulations that require additional disclosure, but they also must assume the prospective customers they’re trying to reach are idiots who aren’t capable of noticing the disclosure material or are too dumb to care. They make me wonder what other laws they’re skirting.