When Jason Fried ran out of contacts while traveling, he went to a Target eye clinic. Instead of being a stickler for policy—Fried’s contact lens prescription had technically expired—Ron from Target simply gave him a set of trial lenses at no charge.

Ron is a very reasonable man. He considered the situation, considered the risk, and did the reasonable thing. He helped someone out who was stuck in a bind. He imagined what it would be like if he was in my shoes, and I was behind the desk instead. He’d want from me what I asked of him. That’s the best service you can ever give.

It made me think about our business. We should be Ron. We all should be more like Ron.Snap out of corporate policy mode, and act under the good neighbor code.

Emphasis in the original.

Whether you run an eye clinic or a software startup or a nonprofit, the role of customer service is the same: to solve the customer’s problem. It doesn’t really matter if you caused the problem. What’s important is that you fix it. Your customers will remember you fondly if you do—and feel bitter towards you if you don’t.

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“Marketers need to escape the ‘urgency trap,’” Flint McLaughlin writes:

They need to transcend the urgent with the important. And this cannot be achieved with yet another “how-to” series. We need to contemplate; indeed, we need to make contemplation part of our normal work cycle.

Marketing, he argues in his book, The Marketer as Philosopher, is as much philosophy as it is science. Scientific marketing experiments like A/B testing can give you data about your customer, but only reflection and thought can help you use that data to understand your customer. And understanding, not clever tactics, is the key to successful marketing.

This is a fascinating explanation of why you sometimes need to make dogleg turns on otherwise straight rural roads:

De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth.

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Neil Jenkins on designing Fastmail’s credit card form:

So, the design and labelling is focused on making it as clear as possible what data the form requires and where to find it. The other part to a successful form is making the data entry itself simple and error-free.

This level of thought and care is all too rare on the web.

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Design, like all aspects of marketing, should serve a business need. Too often, this doesn’t happen, Paul Adams writes:

Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is often more aligned with winning awards than with primary client business objectives) and it’s becoming more prominent in product and interaction design.

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