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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Marketers are obsessed with this idea that people want some kind of "relationship" with them. As if I wake up in the morning, hoping to interact with brands and have experiences around them. I'm not going to follow McDonalds. I'm not going to subscribe to the McDonalds E-mail newsletter. I'm not going to read posts on Twitter from the official McDonalds social media editor. I'm not looking for relevant McDonalds products. I'm not even fucking thinking about you, McDonalds. That goes for all brands, not just them. I wish companies could just back off, offer products, take my money when I buy them, and butt out of my life otherwise.

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I’ve been in this long-running battle with a large non-US appliance maker about their app. I live in a humid place and find notifications that a load is finished in the washer so I can move it quickly to the dryer very useful.

Unfortunately this company has decided to layer on at least one daily notification reminding me to think about all the value their product can bring me. This notification is not strictly marketing, because there’s no buy action anywhere, but it is most certainly the sort of “pay attention to meeeee” whine you commonly see in the most insecure boys.

The thing is that they seem absolutely BAFFLED that anyone wouldn’t want these messages. They cannot conceive that a consumer doesn’t give a shit about their washer/dryer except as a purely functional device. They want to be part of the family, the sort of thing where I think “Gosh I love my wife. Gosh I love my child. Gosh I love my dog. God damn I love my washing machine.” They genuinely believe people think like this. It’s sad and hilarious at the same time.

As an aside, I think you could get a smart plug that would support a 15 amp load that could give you a notification if the load went away. Might not be perfect, but just reading about having a relationship with a washing machine in a theoretical, second-party kind of sense makes me angry :)

Setting up home assistant to send push notifications via Smart plug amperage changes sounds like a great way to begin a long term committed relationship with your appliances

Edit: what the other guy said. I have a diver watch I just spin the dial to see how much time has passed since I started something. One time at the height of my Arduino hackery I didn't have a tea kettle and just boiled water in a sauce pan and said to my roommate, I bet I can shine a laser on the surface of the water to detect when it's boiling and make a noise, she laughs and says congrats you've invented a more complicated whistling kettle. Really humbling experience.

Aren't all washed cycles the same time? Can't you just use a timer? That's what I do. My washer always takes 44 mins

My washer has this 'Eco' mode, that is supposed to optimize time, water, and energy usage based on load weight and how dirty my clothes are. It finishes anywhere between 30 to 50ish minutes. Same settings an d all.

Then you set your alarm to fifty minutes ? Surely the max twenty minutes the laundry spends in the washing machine won’t make a difference.

>Aren't all washed cycles the same time?

No, not at all. It's not really possible unless you're using an extremely basic washer with no spin (Or a very poor spin) cycle. A lot of the reason washers are terrible at estimating how long a wash cycle is going to be is because they spend a variable amount of time balancing the clothes before the spin cycle.

My speed queen is always the same. But that might be because it's a commercial offering

It's likely because of a much slower spin cycle, which is typical of commercial washing machines.

Not only does my washer have different cycle times but I get lost in whatever I’m doing and hours pass lol.

I love… lamp.

I love lamp!

I used to work at a US healthcare company selling a product that doctors prescribe in a medical consultation in a serious medical context that occurs very rarely in a person's life. Everything the marketing/product side of the company did was predicated on the notion that the product would be something that people would have an emotional connection to and would be an important part of people's mental landscapes for a non-trivial proportion of their lifetime.

Given that the product people concerned must have accepted that the people involved (the patients) would have hundreds or thousands of involvements of similar profundity with other commercial products, I'm not sure what's more worrying: the misjudgement of the role of medicine, or the implication that they think that normal people's brains are teeming with 1000s of emotional attachments to random commercial products.

Marketers are what happens when you take the love and dedication that craftsmen have for their creations and separate it from the actual creation process.

They don't make the product, so their love can't actually make it better by including small human touches, or iterating.

They're not sales or traders, so they don't have to care about the nitty gritty of procurement or costs to customers.

All they have & need is excitement.

This would be fine if they were customers, but they're not so its all very parasocial.

(Having said that, I still think about Steak-Umms more than I ever expected because of their deeply satisfying twitter presence, though I’ve never knowingly purchased a steak-umm.)

Some people do though

Unfortunately a lot of people aren't like that. Corporate/brand loyalty is definitely a thing, and not just for products, for all sorts of extraneous reasons. For example, I know people who will buy whatever game Larian and Remedy produce next, and boycott anything EA makes, regardless of the quality or even the genre.

You're on the right side of the bell curve. Marketing works best on the left side of the bell curve.

But the most successful brands are those that infest your life and which it is almost impossible to detach from. How much money and for how many years have you paid interest to "your" bank, for example? Could you switch to another bank? Have you tried?

I can easily switch banks in a day. Not crypto-heavy either. No loans, insurance, contracts with set date. Are there any other reasons why switching is hard?

Same. The most longstanding brands in my life are literally the ones I forget about.

I think you have no idea.

Sure, that's you, but to think no consumers want this kind of relationship with at least some brands, is ignorance.

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