Am I an old man yelling at clouds?  Hear me out:

I was doing some cleaning the other day and had occasion to need a moist towelette.  We keep some from a big brand you’ve heard of for cleaning tasks like the one I had at hand, and I opened a new package.

Now, they’re designed to come out of the pouch much like a tissue out of a box whereby the next one will ‘pop-up’ after you pull one out.  Then there’s a lid that clips down on that opening to keep them all from drying out.  Now, by virtue of them being damp (they are, after all, moist towelettes) and crammed so tightly into the packaging, any time I tried to pull one out, it would tear so that all I ended up with was handful after handful of useless shreds of wet clumps.  I finally gave up and cut the package open at one end with scissors and put what was left of the stack into a Ziplock bag, sealed it and put it back under the counter when I was finished.

Anyway.

All that to say that, I had some feedback for this brand.

To their credit, they actually do have a link on their website that takes you to a page where you can offer your feedback.  But get this:  After I accepted all the terms and conditions on their website and selected my cookie preferences, their online form for providing feedback required me to enter:  My first name, my last name, my email, my “Home Address line 1”, City, State, Zip, and Country; each with the red telltale “*” denoting a “required field” before I could get to the place where I could offer my thoughts.  Yes, the “Address line 2” was optional, at least.

So, in order to tell them that their packaging is maddening and a hassle that costs their Customer waste in their product, I am obligated to provide them (read:  Their Marketing Department) with all my identifying information.  No doubt if I had chosen to do so (and no, I didn’t), they’d have included with all of the advertising that would be on its way to my door and my inbox, the declaration that my “feedback is important” to them.

Pshaw.

If you’re a brand that’s doing this, stop.  You’re never going to get the valuable feedback from people who have something to offer you that would be beneficial to your product or service offerings.  That’s because nobody who simply wants to tell you something that straightforward is going to bother with all that.

I also had to chuckle at the unnecessarily intrusive nature of the information they demanded…from a company that makes household cleaning supplies!  What was I doing, applying for a loan from a bank?

Again, credit where it’s due.  Many brands don’t even offer a way for their Customers to provide feedback.  I’ve stopped taking surveys altogether from brands that send them out only when they feel like it, but otherwise don’t welcome feedback unsolicited.  After all, if they’re calling the terms of when and in what manner you’re allowed to give them your thoughts, they’re not likely all that interested in them in the first place as they’re probably only doing that for marketing purposes anyway.

That said, even this brand apparently needs to be reminded of an evergreen concept:  Your Customers who have feedback (especially the negative type!) are offering you something…that’s valuable lessons about how to do better.  Don’t demand they give you more than that.