Scott Bush

On our recent trip the Yucatan penin­sula, I was sur­prised at the level of cor­po­rate Amer­i­can influ­ence in some of the smaller towns. Per­haps that’s naïve of me… but I didn’t expect to see a Burger King in Merida, the cap­i­tal city of the Mex­i­can state of Yucatan. Nor­mally, I’d not be happy to see a Burger King. This time, though, I was. Why? Because this made me smile:

It’s the Mex­i­can ver­sion of BK’s Angry Whop­per. At the time I hadn’t seen any of the adverts for the Angry Whop­per, so I had no idea what this was; hence, I snapped a shot of it.

For my non-Spanish speak­ing read­ers (which I assume is all four of you), the poster says: “New Angry Whop­per” up top and below explains that it has onions, bacon, jalapenos and hot salsa. The red text on the white back­ground I could fig­ure out myself: “Made your way.” The lit­tle devil guy is com­mand­ing you to “choose fury,” (at least accord­ing to Google Trans­late).

See­ing this didn’t make me want to run out and eat one, but I did find it inter­est­ing to see the inter­na­tional aspect of a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Had I seen the cam­paign in Eng­lish I would have seen this and known imme­di­ately what it was. But because I hadn’t I thought this might be some­thing unique to the area. I sup­pose that was a silly thought given the global nature of the Burger King cor­po­rate empire.

But sim­ple posters and TV com­mer­cials weren’t enough  to prop­erly mar­ket this  880-calorie mon­stros­ity.  They also went with a Face­book app. (Seems like every­thing has to have a social-media com­po­nent these days.) But rather than let­ting you build a burger or play some spicy-themed game, this app wants you to sac­ri­fice your friends to the burger. Do so with 10 friends and you get a free burger. Hmmm… not sure about you but my friends are worth more than a free fast food burger. If some­one sac­ri­ficed me to a mar­ket­ing ploy, I’d be “furioso.”

My wife’s aging “blueberry,“—a Black­berry cell phone so old that it was actu­ally made of the orig­i­nal blue plastic–finally gave up the ghost and she needed a replace­ment. Off to the AT&T store we went and I was pleased to find the company’s newer mod­els were attrac­tive, func­tional, and more afford­able than an iPhone. She chose a sleek, red Black­berry Curve 8310. We got her SIM, data plan, and voice­mail trans­ferred and we were off. All in all, a very pos­i­tive experience.

Until she dug around in the box for the phone’s hol­ster, which all Black­ber­ries have. “That’s weird,” she said to me as we drove home. “The hol­ster has a fake belt clip.”

“Hmmmm?” I asked, unsure of what a “fake” belt clip meant. “It’s FAKE,” came the annoyed reply. I was annoyed, too. Turns out that the black leather hol­ster that comes with the phone has a piece of leather sewn on the back that looks like a belt clip to hold the holster—and the phone—secure. But it’s sewn com­pletely onto the hol­ster, and can’t be slipped into a pocket or belt. Upon fur­ther inspec­tion, I saw that the por­tion of the hol­ster to which the clip is sewn is cut away.

What was RIM think­ing with such a use­less design? First, the entire hol­ster itself is cheaply made and doesn’t fit the phone well. In fact, push­ing the Curve into the hol­ster actu­ally presses the “shift” keys on the left and right cor­ners of the bot­tom row of key­pad but­tons. The top of the phone sticks out and because it’s wedged in there it’s dif­fi­cult to pull it out. It really is com­pletely use­less! Why bother, RIM? You should have saved your­selves the 25 cents this thing is worth and us the insult of think­ing we wouldn’t know any better.

Ah, here’s the rea­son: search Google for “black­berry curve 8310 hol­ster” and you’ll see the first few pages of results are for acces­sory mak­ers sell­ing replace­ment hol­sters. That’s fine—after-market acces­sories are often bet­ter and pro­vide dif­fer­ent fea­tures for dif­fer­ent use styles. But with the older Black­ber­ries, the hard plas­tic cases they came with were use­ful out of the box so you didn’t have to pur­chase some­thing else unless you wanted to.

Per­haps the case that accom­pa­nies their more expen­sive mod­els is bet­ter, but even if so it’s no excuse. You owe your cus­tomers bet­ter than this, RIM.