Wes’s Life

Expe­dia — the same people you can book your travel through — have a spokesman. Did you know that? I barely caught it myself and couldn’t find a pic­ture of him online in a quick attempt (the pic­ture below is a screen­shot from a YouTube video). So where does he show up? At the end of the com­mer­cials for about 3 sec­onds … maybe.

I think this is Expedia’s attempt at making a trans­par­ent spokesper­son — some­one we can all asso­ciate with since we can’t not asso­ciate with him. There’s noth­ing dis­agree­able about him, at least in the three sec­onds we have to look at him. He looks clean and well off, I mean he’s wear­ing a suit, how bad can he be?

But is this really that good of an idea? To hire a spokesper­son that is so generic that no one will find him dis­agree­able seems like a waste of cash because no one will remem­ber him for being asso­ci­ated with your com­pany. He’ll always just be that guy who was on that com­mer­cial you saw one time between reruns of Myth­busters and Dirty Jobs.

Bright and early this morn­ing — roughly 10 AM — our new oven showed up. It’s been a long time coming for this new oven as the old one would rou­tinely burn any­thing that had the ill fate of any­thing inside.

Any­ways, I don’t want to bore you with that. What I found inter­est­ing about the whole encounter was reg­is­ter­ing the range. It was a pain­less process that should def­i­nitely be noted by other com­pa­nies in the indus­try every­where.

So, fol­low­ing the instruc­tions on the reg­is­tra­tion form, I went to May​tag.com and was greeted with this:

This alone wowed me. For the most part, I’d say com­pa­nies like Maytag and Ken­more don’t really care too much about how there web­sites look because people don’t really care if they look good, just if the prod­uct per­forms well and lasts a long time. The time and effort to create this site is def­i­nitely appre­ci­ated.

Look­ing around, I found the prod­uct reg­is­tra­tion link. Which, in hind­sight, could be a little better placed con­sid­er­ing most people coming to this site are prob­a­bly coming to reg­is­ter their prod­ucts. I expected the usual rig­ma­role of reg­is­ter­ing a prod­uct — sev­eral pages of infor­ma­tion, check­boxes about hear­ing about prod­ucts, my annual income, level of edu­ca­tion and doing all of this over sev­eral ran­domly broken up pages — but what I got was this:

A simple one page form asking me who I was, what I bought and if I was plan­ning on buying any more appli­ances in the next few months. This process was so pain­less and so dif­fer­ent from most other reg­is­tra­tion forms — even their own paper form was far more com­pli­cated — that I was happy to fill this form out.