Lamenting The Loss Of My Promotional Calendar

Share on Facebook
Tweet This
Post on LinkedIn

I am sick with disappointment. This year, unlike all others since 2005, my beach house realtor has eliminated the promotional calendar and (gasp!) replaced it with a double sided (get ready) word search. Yes, you read correctly — a word search, two sided no less.
Now I don’t know about you, but there aren’t too many people over the age of 7 who enjoy these things. Part of the reason may be that in the end you’re left with a bunch of overlapping ovals and a list of crossed out words. Once the “fun” is over, that’s it. A throw away. Being two sided is almost like a slap in the face… as if one word search was not enough.
Completely unlike that awesome promotional  calendar, sized to fit just above my keyboard, that displayed the whole year at a glance. I looked at that calendar (and saw my realtor’s name) from one to  ten times a day, every day. I relied on that durable little strip to plan ahead, get a quick glimpse of the upcoming months. This calendar was what every promotional product needs to be, high quality, intuitively useful and delivered right on time.
Yes I have technology and a great calendar app… but the promotional calendar was just there… always ready to be looked at. I didn’t have to do a thing. While we’ve talked before about how the printed calendar is far from doomed, this is a perfect example. That promotional calendar offered a valuable service, and incidentally had plenty of room for the realtor name and phone number.
Now I’m left with the unenviable task of finding (and paying for) a calendar to do the job the  one from my realtor did. Apparently I’m not alone, because while there’s been a drop in usage for the printed calendar, it’s not as m ugh as you might think… from 98% of homes/businesses with calendars in 1981 to 78% homes/businesses with wall calendars in 2011
What’s especially irritating is that clearly this business does not care what I think… and I honestly don’t know why they even bothered with the word search. Due to a peculiarity of the market a foolish debacle like this — a nonverbal “we don’t care what you think” — has no impact on the realtors bottom line. The whole experience has gotten me to wondering if there’s any research on the reaction of customers when a promo product they expect, love and use goes away.
This subject feels cheated out of a useful perk.
And that’s not a good feeling for a customer (or employee for that matter) to have, don’t you think?

— end —