Have you ever felt like some company was buzzing around you, becoming so irritating and you couldn’t seem to bat them away. All they wanted was a little bit of your blood.
Take the banks and cell phone companies. Somebody, please… take them…
They are constantly sucking just a little bit of blood out of you. Just a little bit. You notice and it makes you itch, but it is not enough to feel that they are totally parasitic. And so they keep sucking.
You might have also concluded that they are all the same, so why switch anyway.
We have come a long way from when companies tried to generate raving fans by providing outstanding service. Now they are happy limping along and sucking a little blood.
If your call really was important to them, they would have enough operators to handle the inbound traffic. Suck, suck.
The frequency of exposure of commercials, direct marketing, pop up ads, etc. can create that buzzing-around-your-head in the dark feeling. That’s mosquito capitalism in action.
Once the mosquitoes are let loose, there is no telling how much blood they can suck out of their captive audiences. Wells Fargo Bank in the US was just slapped with a newspaper like a mosquito, only it was from the US government. Wells Fargo had to spit out $3 billion in fines for its activities.
Government seems to be the only referee we have to keep the suckers off of us. In the US, government seems to have backed off on all but the most egregious parasitic activity.
To be effective mosquito capitalists, companies have to suck just a little blood out of their customers, just enough to make it worthwhile but not enough that the customer realizes there is a mosquito living off of them.
Think of Netflix – how many times have you watched it this month? Or your gym membership, magazine subscriptions, all those little bits of blood dripping from your accounts. People forget. The credit card was the magic gift to subscription renewals for magazines. It was automatic.
As Monty Python’s poet McTeagle said “What’s twenty quid to the bloody Midland Bank?” A pinch here, a nibble there, a drop of blood isn’t much.
Yes you can take advantage of the weak or the easy victims among your customers. But should you? It’s how you milk a business, not grow one.