For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
it's a great marketing platform, if anything. Strong brand loyalty going forward and costs you not much to do well, not to mention you can brighten a day or few for thousands of kids in all sorts of life situations.
You're severely mistaken if you think that's how businesses operate. Companies penny pinch on staff even for recruiting, they're not gonna increase headcount just to answer mail form kids just because you think it makes good marketing.
You can spin up any idea and claim it increases brand loyalty, but you have to have actual evidence that that either happens or actually matters in some way, and in this case it probably doesn't and isn't worth the expense once the scale exceeds >1 employee spending more than a few minutes a day. If you've got the data to prove otherwise so that you can actually make someone money, go ahead and sell people on the idea.
I don't have to - it's called image branding and is a well-known and established marketing discipline. Not direct ROI like hard sell techniques, but it lands you with higher margins, lower customer acqusition costs, longer customer lifetime value, etc. Apple was a master at that, Nike, and in this particular example LEGO regularly responds to children mail, Nintendo built a whole business channel around it with Nintendo Power and I'm sure I could pull out many more examples. Not everything is a hard sell technique.
So according to you, we should all quit our jobs and go work for Lego, Nike, Apple and Nintendo because they have good PR with kids, while you ignore the fact that most of them use sweatshop labor in China, fuck the environment and sue honest people for bullshit IP reasons?
If the problem of society could be summed up in one bite, this would be it.
Obviously the concept is different from the execution, and you provided an idea on execution (which anyone can do) which would need to be actually, you know, proved out to help with any kind of brand loyalty. Just doing random things that sound good is not a great strategy.
Because you actually believe the world is full of benevolent companies who work for the public good?
Or maybe people have seen what companies are doing behind the scenes that goes against their PR, making it worthless and hypocritic. Remember "don't be evil"?
You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.
I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.