[Jester's Trek] Quote of the Week: Bad mouth
Quote of the Week: Bad mouth
Last Monday evening, I was invited to NinjaTurtle's Declarations of War pod-cast, which is (as far as I can tell) is sort of the officially unofficial pod-cast of Noir Mercenary Group. It was the first time I've been invited to participate in a pod-cast since my CSM6 run a couple of years ago. The topic of the invitation was similar: Alekseyev Karrde and Hans Jagerblitzen from CSM7 wanted to debate me about my recent CSM7 posts and I was happy to oblige. I didn't even mind getting blobbed when Seleene showed up, too. ;-)
Anyway, QOTW honors was going to go to something said in that pod-cast but it hasn't been posted yet. I'll let you know when it is. In the meantime, I'm going to go with this for QOTW because it made me laugh:
Editor?s Note: The opinion of this article is that of the author and not reflective of the view of Ten Ton Hammer.The Mittani has written 82 pieces for Ten Ton Hammer now and I can't recall any of them ever getting a disclaimer at the top before. But the latest piece has this disclaimer. What's the topic? themittani.com, of course. Why did the piece get a disclaimer? Because the majority of the piece bad-mouths the competition... including Ten Ton Hammer, by proxy.(1)
I can't imagine why TTH might have a problem with that. ;-)
Here's a really basic negotiating trick that you can use as a buyer whenever you're buying an expensive product. Tell the salesman that you're thinking about going with competing product X. It doesn't matter what it is. Ask the salesman if he's aware of any problems with the competing product. When I ask this question, I like to ask it extremely bluntly: "Want to say some bad things about X while I think about this?"
A smart salesman will politely decline to bad-mouth the competition. If the salesman indulges in this opportunity, know what you're going to learn? All the weaknesses of the salesman's product! Listen to all the ways in which the salesman bad-mouths the competition. The things the salesman doesn't mention? Those are the weaknesses in his own product. Suppose you're buying a car, and your salesman says the competing product has lower gas mileage, less cargo space, and a lower safety rating. What wasn't mentioned? Those are probably the weaknesses of the car you're looking at... things like price, engine power, and interior amenities.
A salesman that is willing to bad-mouth a competing product isn't going to neglect to mention these important factors if he's in the middle of bad-mouthing the competition. Since they weren't mentioned? Yeah. Those are his own product's weaknesses.
Trying to sell something expensive? Here's a tip: don't bad mouth the competition and don't let yourself get drawn into doing so.
So, it's kind of fun to read Mittens's piece with this negotiating trick in mind...
In the meantime, once the DOW pod-cast is up, I'll have a few things to say about it.
(1) Quote from the piece: "Meanwhile, the very same crisis [last year's summer of rage] demonstrated conclusively that the 'official' , 'mainstream' or 'professional' gaming media fundamentally misunderstood core aspects of what Eve was, what the community cared about, or even the English language."
Source: Quote of the Week: Bad mouth