What happens if you forget your audience

18th July 2009 | Posted in Branding

For effective e-marketing, it is hugely important to pitch your message to the needs and knowledge of your audience. Here’s an example of getting it wrong. This invitation was sent to a Yahoo group of “ordinary” individuals who have a high-level interest in statistics to help them with their mutual interest – horse racing.

“Dear All

“This is a reminder of my invitation to the coming seminar

“Title: Cardinal Consistency of Reciprocal Preference Relations: A Characterization of Multiplicative Transitivity

“Summary:
Consistency of preferences is related with rationality, which is associated with the transitivity property. Many properties suggested to model transitivity of preferences are inappropriate for reciprocal preference relations. In this talk, a functional equation is put forward to model the cardinal consistency in the strength of
preferences of reciprocal preference relations. It is shown that under the assumptions of continuity and monotonicity properties, the set of representable uninorm operators is characterized as the solution to
this functional equation. Cardinal consistency with the conjunctive representable Cross Ratio uninorm is equivalent to Tanino’s multiplicative transitivity property. Because any two representable uninorms are order isomorphic, we conclude that multiplicative transitivity is the most appropriate property for modelling cardinal consistency of reciprocal preference relations. Results towards the characterization of this uninorm consistency property  based on a
restricted set of (n-1) preference values, which can be used in practical cases to construct perfect consistent preference relations, are also presented.”

Well, I did a bit of statistics at university but this is written in a foreign language to me. Chances are no one on the list understands a word that’s written there. So instead of boosting the profile of the speaker and the seminar, it’s made them a bit of a joke. Shame.

Moral: check your mailing list before firing off your DMs and invitations. Take out those who won’t appreciate or value your messages, or adjust your messaging to suit your audience!