How NOT to market yourself.

I thought about this a bit, and decided I should write up about a company that offered Groupon coupons: "RB's Ice Cream Deserts".

Obviously the reason why I have the name in quotes, is because "deserts' is incorrectly spelled; you see, the owner created his own website, but couldn't spell his own company's name, even when it was sitting in front of his face in the company logo.  Lame, right?

Well, his self-created website is chock full of spelling errors, everywhere.  Don't do that.

Notice the purple arrow? Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with calling yourself locally-owned, but using some stock photo filled with an all-white family is not exactly what you'd find in Hawaii. Worse, instead of cropping the image to fit, he scaled it to fit in width.  Don't do that either.

Seriously, comic-sans?  Who uses comic-sans as a font for a website selling desserts to adults?  Most definitely don't do that.

Let me backtrack a moment.  The reason why I'm writing up a post on this company, starts with how BAD his customer service was.  Allow me to redirect you to the Yelp listing where many people encountered the same problem I had: he got in over his head with Groupon, and decided to take the month off and not respond to any emails, phone calls, or site visits.  I had to get a credit back from Groupon, because this chump wouldn't respond back and didn't even answer his front door!  Don't do that, ever.

It gets worse.

Turns out in 2009, he temporarily registered as a General Domestic Partnership for less than a month, at a Date Street address, for about a month.  The last week of the Groupon offer, the owner filed Articles of Termination with the State of Hawaii's Business Registration Division on his LLC at the address shown on his website.  

It turns out, the owner maintains "RB's Ice Cream Desserts, Inc" on Auahi Street, which is listed as their mailing address.  It's in Ward Center, which leads me to believe this is their actual operations for its sales / distribution, but not retail.  But why all the complexity of business registrations?  Do that, and people will get mighty suspicious, so don't do that.

Folks, this is how NOT to market yourself.