A bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones picked out
A tiny shop hanging from a steep cliff face in China’s Hunan province has been dubbed the most ‘inconvenient convenience store’ in the country.
The wooden shed, which is 394 ft above ground in Shiniuzhai National Geological Park, is manned by one member of staff at a time.
The journey to the shop, where stock is replenished using ziplines, takes 90 minutes, and any climbers who make it are rewarded with a free bottle of water.
Like Van Halen’s backstage demands for no brown M&Ms, there are two words for this: hard work. So this week…
Are you making things difficult for prospects?
Perhaps it’s the page titles on your website that might sound cool, but aren’t clear enough to make people click. May be it’s your calls to action that sound tricksy:
• Download a toolkit
• Watch our financial documentaries
• Get your free workbook
As a prospect, the last thing I want to do is work. I want the opposite: someone to take all the burden and responsibility away. Someone to free up my time, not add to it. Someone to stop the information overload and allow me to get back to watching The Crown.
I’m not knocking free downloads
These are extremely valuable spanners in your marketing bumbag. They wield the power to transform a mere website visitor into an engaged, hot-to-trot prospect. So let’s work these monsters into shape.
• ‘Resources’ sounds more enticing than toolkit.
• ‘1-minute videos’ sounds more manageable than documentaries.
• ‘Guide’ sounds more relaxed than workbook.
These phrases are also a bit more focused towards an opportunity and less transactional and demanding.
So next time you’re creating a call to action, check to make sure that it feels accessible. Would you click on it?
Snooze control
A third of British employees admit to wearing pyjamas while working from home, a survey for employment firm Indeed has found.
Food's out
According to the Waitrose cooking report, a quarter of UK adults have never boiled an egg and don’t know how to. Four-fifths have never made a salad dressing.
Paper cut
Real paper made from actual trees is still considered crucial to countless systems globally - in some cases there are strong reasons for holding on to paper, says BBC Future.
Trend spotting
Exploding Topics this week identified Senitel, a visual deepfake detection software, as having risen 2900% in terms of searches, conversations and mentions across the internet.
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