VMWare's Mother's day offer

Did you get it? No? Well than you missed something.

Two weeks ago I received two messages in the mail from VMWare with a Mother's day offer:

The first one addressed me, telling me how VMWare would save me time that I could than spent on finding my mum the perfect gift (yeah right) but the most interesting one I think is the second one, the one that actually indirectly targets the mums themselves through you as the recipient. Telling you how it would help your mum run her PC apps on a Mac.

Now why do I find that interesting? Well, lets face it. For most people in the VMWare target audience, 'mum' is really not that savvy with pc's. My mum (bless her), struggles to send an email and doesn't even know the difference between a Windows pc and a Mac. I can't blame her, she is of a generation that didn't grow up with pc's and only learned using one as a bare necessity when my brother temporarily moved to the Caribbeans.

Yes, there is a whole new generation of mum's rising as we speak that did grow up with computers and might be interested in the VMWare tools but somehow I doubt that many of their kids actually were on that mailing list VMWare used to send out the offer. Most of them are simply to young. So was this a shot in the dark?

Well that is why I find it intriguing. Over the last two weeks several people told me about this offer and how funny they found it (for the above mentioned reasons). Which is precisely why I think it was a really clever piece of marketing.
I mean, how often would you actually talk to your friends of colleagues about such a message? In general most people would regard it as spam and delete it right away. But this one was so outrageous that I actually took time to read it. Clearly I was not alone.
On the other hand it is not that outrageous at all as even the older generations are catching up quickly and generally aren't that dimwitted as we might think they are when it comes to pc's. So eventhough it might not seem the most obvious target group it certainly is gaining corporate interest fast. Whatever the reason; it worked! They got my attention and (as an avid reader of my blog) undoubtedly also my mums attention.

I still don't think she has a clue what VMWare is though....

Drijg briev!

Ok, sometimes you just need to not take yourself too serious. Especially when it comes to thinking about your life and career. On moments like that I can always trust on my Mum. She has saved every little scrap of paper I ever produced and among those are some real gems of personal insight. This one (I was 8) is one of those. Now, it is in Dutch (if you discount the numerous typo's) and it would lose its significance in translation but it reads more or less: "Mama this is a threat letter. Give me 200 cents". Apparently I handed it to her with a smile on my face.

.

Luckily for me I lost those criminal urges early on and chose a different career path because I don't think it would have sustained me for very long (200 cents!).