I’ve sent them the last notice of sorts. It reads:

“Dear Terra Chips Consumer Relations,
Eliot Frick here. I’ve sent you three emails through your “contact us” form. This one makes my fourth. By now, I have a hard time imagining that no one there is aware of my attempts to get a response from someone other than an autoresponder at your company. I’ve been discussing it on my blog. You can find the discussion here:
https://high.bigwidesky.com/
Read the “Grounded Chips” posts. There are links at other blogs now as well. For example here:
https://loop.integritycorporation.com/2008/02/chipping-in.html
…and in the comments thread here:
https://www.ideasonideas.com/2008/02/blogs_can_kill_brands/
Per the suggestion of one of my readers, I’ve decided to set a deadline of the day that we finish the bag of chips to receive a response from you. At that point, if I (and my readers) haven’t received a response, I suppose I’ll have to conclude that you don’t really care about my questions and comments. We’re down to crumbs at the bottom of the bag as of this evening (Sunday the 17th). I want y’all to pull it out at the 11th hour, so I’m going to give it until the end of the day tomorrow before concluding anything.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter that much if you don’t respond. I mean, the world will keep turning. You’ll keep selling chips. But this has been a genuine, good-faith request on my part. I think anyone who reads the blog will agree. They may also come to some conclusions about your brand based upon your response, or lack thereof.
Best Wishes,
Eliot Frick”

Not looking good I’m afraid. But I won’t rule out a last minute save. Good luck, Terra Chips Consumer Relations! I’m pullin’ for ya!

Taking Matt’s suggestion, I shall arbitrarily decide that the Terra Chips Consumer Relations team isn’t particularly interested in my comments and questions as of the day we finish the remaining chips in the bag and go buy more (perhaps other) chips. Given that half the bag of chips is now inside my vacuum, it shouldn’t be long. Given that I’m having a mild attack of diverticulitis (don’t ask), I’ll leave it up to my wife and kids to consume said chips.
What’s more, Matt has been kind enough to offer support of my chip foibles over at the Integrity Corporation blog. Given Google’s willingness to index anything and its love of all things blog, I’m not surprised to find my post comes up at the top of this search and it is the second result for this search.

I really want to give them every opportunity to respond, so I just sent them another note:

“Dear Terra Chip Consumer Relations,
I really want to give y’all every opportunity to be a part of the conversation that is happening on my blog about your brand. I’ve already contacted you twice through the “contact us” form on your site. You’ve yet to respond. Which is okay I suppose. I’m not too bothered per se. But I thought you’d be interested to know that a Google search for “terra chips hard time opening” now lists my blog post as the first result and a search for “terra chips consumer relations” has my blog as the second result. So, y’know, people are reading about your brand on my blog. They’re taking note of the fact that you’re not participating in the conversation. They’re drawing conclusions.
I have every hope you’ll participate in the conversation. Certainly, you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have the temerity to demand you participate. I still like your chips. I wish you the best in determining how to respond to this. There’s also nothing wrong with asking for help. I’d be happy to offer council as to the most effective way of getting into the conversation. You’ve got my email address after all, ask away!
Cheers,
Eliot Frick”

Third message in three days. There’s about an eighth of the bag left. Still no response.

I really don’t expect anything from them. I don’t need free chips or anything like that. Mostly, I’d just like to know that they heard me. I don’t expect them to change for me, but I would hope they could at least do me the courtesy of offering some explanation for my experience. Maybe it’s the intended behavior of the package. Maybe they’re trying to say, “hey it’s hard work to get the bag open which is done out of respect for how great the chips are—y’know, like ya gotta work for it.” Whatever the reason for the packaging and for the nature of the contact form, I can’t see how it would be particularly onerous for them to explain it to me. I did give them my address after all.

In the interest of the benefit of the doubt, I just sent them another message through their contact form. Here it is:

“Dear Terra Chips Consumer Relations,
I used the form on the “contact us” page of your site to inform you of the difficulty I have opening bags of Terra Kettles. I was going to leave it at that, but my experience with your website was frustrating and so I decided to let you know about that experience and share it with the readers of my blog. It is now approaching the end of a second business day since I offered these insights and despite being told in the auto-reply that my “questions and comments are very important to [you]” I haven’t received any response. I’m sure this is an oversight on your part.
I don’t want to assume that you in fact do not consider my experience with your brand important so I thought I would write again and let you know I have, in fact, written about the experience on my blog. You can read about it at https://high.bigwidesky.com/ – the title of the post is “Grounded Chips”. I’m still awaiting some kind of response from you so that I can tell everyone what a responsive and authentically human brand you have.
Here’s to your great-tasting chips and the expectation that you will be in touch post haste.
Thank you,
Eliot Frick”

Looking at the site, one can see that they don’t seem to have any hesitation displaying the positive feedback they receive from customers. Let’s hope they don’t have any hesitation dealing with critical feedback. At some point, if I don’t receive a response, I’m going to have to conclude otherwise.

So Bigwidesky is in a holding pattern. Things have changed and will change again. Such is the way of things. As an incredibly brilliant person just suggested to me today, “I know I will not get out of this life alive…” That obviously means what it means, but perhaps less obviously it suggests that the only constant is the lack of constancy. How’s that for a self-referential paragraph, eh?

But I’m not interested in digging into all of that right now. I’ll be saying more about Bigwidesky shortly. Right now I’m employing my potato chip greased fingers to clack out this little experiment. It’s an experiment that has been tried many times before. I’m not going to dig up specific links at the moment, but you can go to the consumerist and elsewhere and find other things like what I’m about to blog. But hey, I’m in a potato chip induced, altered state of consciousness.

To be brief, I had a hard time opening a bag of Terra Chips. In particular, Terra Kettles. This isn’t the first time. So I should have known better, but I’m in my office and I don’t have scissors, so I applied the requisite pressure to actually the open the bag; which is to say the same amount of force necessary to move the Earth to a new orbit. Needless to say, my hapless-self got chips all over the place. I decided I should let the people who make these chips know that while the chips are good, they are packaged in an armored truck.

I had a little trouble with the site. Not unlike the way I had trouble with the bag of chips. Perhaps this is a little like Charlie Brown in the Halloween special where he comes to the party in a sheet filled with holes and explains that he “had a little trouble with the scissors.” I admit it, I have brain damage. But putting that aside, the bag really is hard to open and the website really does leave something to be desired. I could explain further, but I’ll just let the bit that I wrote them do the explaining for me:

“To begin, your product tastes great. So consider my criticism in light of that. I have a small complaint, which is unfortunately exacerbated by your poor online mechanism for communicating it to you.
My complaint is simple: your bags are too difficult to open by hand. Not a deal-breaker, it’s just annoying. I still buy your product, but if I find an alternative that matches the quality of your product and is packaged in a manner that allows easier access, I would likely switch.

However, I did not want to have to provide you with my address in order to tell you this. I would suggest you unhitch the opportunity for your consumers to provide feedback from your marketing efforts. Just because I might care enough about your brand to tell you about a problem with it doesn’t mean I want to give you my personal information. If I wasn’t feeling benevolent, I would have just put bogus data in your form. I mean you actually have the audacity to require me to give you this stuff just to submit the form. I’m not signing up for a service. I get absolutely nothing in return for telling you where I live, whereas you get another address in your database. Not a fair exchange.

From a user experience perspective, “contact us” is a poor navigational device to lead users to an opportunity to offer insights such as the one I’m offering. I don’t have to tell you. I could have just switched to another brand and you would have never learned the insight. I would encourage you to call out the opportunity to offer feedback more directly with nomenclature like, “tell us how you feel about terra chips” or similar. It should be conversational and approachable in order to be effective.

Further undermining user experience is that when I navigate to the “privacy policy” page from your contact form, when I return to the contact form, state is not maintained. What is meant by that is that all the data in the form is lost. You probably lose a significant amount of comments right there because people fill out the form, see that they can read your privacy policy, click the link and then come back to an empty form and decide it’s not worth the trouble to fill it all out again.

Now comes the fun part. I have a blog. I’m going to write about this experience. You’re lucky. I’m telling you about this. Most won’t. I would charge my clients for this knowledge. Frankly, I’m not even sure why I’m offering you all this valuable advice except that I really do like the way your chips taste. That and I’m sitting here with a bag of them that is half empty because the force required to open the bag tore it apart and chips went everywhere. So let’s see what you do next. I’m interested to find out. Maybe I’ll get to praise you in my blog. Maybe not.”

So we’ll see what happens. I’ll let y’all know. I mean, given that no one has posted here in months, “y’all” in that last sentence may refer only to myself, but Google will index this post like a good little monkey and people will read it and the Terra Chip folks will either reap the benefit or the negativity. Or maybe they’ll hire me to consult on how to improve their relationship with their consumers. Or maybe I’ll get a clue and just use a tool to open the bag next time. Y’know, like a blowtorch.

Well, their autoresponder works. Yay. I got an email saying:

“This email is to confirm that we have received your email and will reply as soon as possible. Your questions and comments are very important to us. For immediate assistance our Consumer Relations Team is available to help you at 1-800-434-4246 (Monday – Friday, 7:00am-12:00 & 12:30-5:00pm MT). Thank you for your interest in our products.
Sincerely,
Terra Chips Consumer Relations”

So far, so good I suppose. I find the tenor of the email pretty cold. But hey, it was sent by a computer. Also, “Terra Chips Consumer Relations”? I know, 99% of all CPG companies have a customer service or relations group that calls themselves something like this, but it’s a damn terrible name. It’s got a real Terry Gilliam’s Brazil kind of thing going on. How about something like “The Chip Herding Team”? Oh, and I’ll take you at face value that my questions and comments are important to you, but my experience with the site kind of belies that. In fact, maybe don’t even tell me that. I should be the judge of whether you really think what I have to say is important. Show it, don’t tell it.

The concept is dead on; execution notwithstanding. We’ve been talking about this for a while now.

Henry is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I read one of his books several months ago, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” and it was very much one of those right-book-at-the-right-time kind of things. The book is about the ways in which new communication technologies are empowering and encouraging participation in media by people who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do so. It also discusses the gamut of response to these new possibilities; some welcoming, some smug, some fearful.
But I thought of Henry, because I knew he’d be thinking about how the whole YouTube/CNN debate format is appears to be an almost watershed moment for these technologies. And he’s blogged an edifying post about it.
To wit:

“In the 1990s, an alternative — the town hall meeting debate — emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question — and why they ask it — is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective — the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can’t get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses — Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were “individuals” who “made a difference.”

What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying “I feel your pain” a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.”

It seems that increasingly, the prize will go to those who know how to navigate this new media landscape. And by that I don’t mean those who learn to game the system, I mean those who recognize that the transparency it creates demands that they be genuine humans.

Now let me just say that there are other bloggers I enjoy whom hail from generally the same geography as the author of Shotgun Marketing, Chris Houchens and so I was curious. Standard blogger template blog. A smattering of comments here and there.

But pow, the second post from the top struck me as perfect. Granted, this is no representative sample he’s talking about (18 people) but there is definitely a rat race of memetic novelty that happens among the wired crowd.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that it takes a Kentucky blog to point that out. Good on you, Chris. I’m starting to think there needs to be a media vehicle dedicated to marketing from the midwestern/southern perspective. Just to hijack the point of his post and expand it, I think it’s interesting that those who presume to speak for what the futures should look like are largely from the coasts, and those for whom such futures are intended are everywhere. Hell, I’m even being (consciously) US-centric in this post.