Ep. 291- What’s Up THIS WEEK:🍓$19 Erewhon STRAWBERRY?➕SPRING Subject Lines Tests! Instagram AI NONSENSE

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Welcome to do this not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for what's up this week from the do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. This is our super short episode or breakdown what's going on this week in business and marketing and life.

And we still have our short ask us anything in our big tips episode at the end of the week. So what's going on?

Well, I just flew Southwest this weekend, and I do not understand what they're doing with their marketing because Southwest announced this week that they are ending their baggage policy, their very popular baggage policy where you're allowed to check up to two bags of free.

And this follows on the news that they were also getting rid of their whole open seat thing, which was the unique thing that only Southwest did, which I'm not a huge fan of, the open seat thing, but it was kind of this quirky thing that kind of makes Southwest stand out a little bit. And I don't get it. You know, sometimes, you know, you have a meeting like, oh, this is a great idea. Let's cut this. Let's get rid of that.

But if you're not looking at it, the overall message and that it's sending to your loyal customers and people that care about your brand, and you're eliminating things that make you who you are. The numbers don't always tell that story. And the amazing part from a marketing perspective is that other brands jumped on this to make fun of them.

So Amtrak posted a post that went viral and they wrote, guess we're the only ones doing free baggage now. And it got over 13 million views.

And then Aldi the supermarket also made a viral post on TikTok that that completely shredded Southwest for doing this. So other brands get it. Why does the Southwest get it? What else going on? Well, coming up, March 20th is the first day of spring. Let's go, man.

South Florida, it's already crazy hot. I know, I know people don't want to hear that, but it's crazy hot down here.

But something related to email marketing that sometimes we sleep on is that when you could jump on something that we all care about, we don't even realize we care about it. And you Insert it into your email marketing, especially your subject lines.

And this Data is from Subject Line.com you can get a nice little lift to your email engagement, regardless of your business or a consumer marketer. So first, the first day of spring is one of those things.

So for example, right now and for about the next week, maybe to 10 days, if you include certain words and phrases in your subject line, you'll see about a 10 to 15% lift in your email open rates according to subject line.com related to the start of spring. So words like fresh or the word spring or the word refresh or grow, and especially this idea of spring cleaning.

If you insert spring cleaning into your subject line, it does really great. And some of you business markers out there are like, wow, I can't do that. But no, you can.

Things like your CRM spring cleaning checklist, are you ready? Or spring cleaning question mark. Start with your tech stack.

You know, it might feel a little bit cheesy, but you're being part of the moment and that's what you want. You want to feel current, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel part of what's going on. So yeah, cheesy is what we do.

So get fired up for spring. Try to test that in some of your marketing. Now in completely ridiculous use of AI news.

Every day AI stuff comes out and sometimes it's like, what are we doing? Is this really the best use of AI? And this one's up there. So apparently Instagram this week is now experimenting with AI generated comments on posts.

What does that even mean? So that means according to social media today, what's going on is for some Instagram users, they're now starting to see an icon in the comments area.

Okay, It's a little pencil with a star icon and it's next to comment, the comment area.

So when you go to post a comment on any, anything real, a story or whatever it is that you're looking at, it will generate a list for you of possible comments that you could make on that post. And then you click on it and whatever. What are we doing? So we no longer need to like have any ability to have original thought.

Like, is this necessary that somebody has to tell us how to comment on a post? What a. I hope this doesn't happen because this is stupid. I mean, straight up stupid.

Speaking of stupid, now we're going to talk about something really stupid. This is useless news. Have you seen this thing of this $19 strawberry that's everywhere?

This Erawan strawberry nonsense that's going on so if you haven't seen started, of course in la, where there is this strawberry, that's a big deal in Japan, it's called the Erawan strawberry. It costs $19 a strawberry for one strawberry. Okay? And this thing has gone viral.

People are waiting hours in line to get this one strawberry to spend about 20 bucks on a strawberry. And the whole thing is that it's supposed to be super duper sweet. So apparently there's a, there's a sweetness scale, the brick sweetness scale.

And regular strawberries are like a seven, but these strawberries are 16 to 19. Okay. And so people are losing their minds trying to find these strawberries, these Erewhon strawberries and try them out. And this is ridiculous.

I mean, I, you know, in Japan there's this culture of like high end fruits. It's a thing people gift each other, you know, fruits. I've been there. And you go to the supermarket and in Japan it's really wild.

Like the regular supermarket, they'll have like a full cantaloupe, okay?

And the cantaloupe will be in the nicest wrapping as if it's a Christmas gift and it's expensive and you buy this thing and then you would gift it to somebody. So these Erewhon strawberries are like that. In Japan, there are this whole fancy situation.

So now everyone's racing to try to get one of these stupid things. And I got to tell you, I don't care. I just don't care how good this strawberry tastes. You're not going to get me to pay 20 bucks for a strawberry.

I wouldn't pay 20 bucks for a thing of strawberries. I don't even. I don't even know. I just don't even know what's going on. We've lost our minds between AI comments in in Instagram. $20 strawberries.

What are we doing? What are we doing? I don't know what I'm doing. Listen, I appreciate you being here. It'd be awesome if you left this thing review.

You'd be my new best friend. I would not buy you a $20 strawberry if you left it review. But I would think about it and that's all that really matters. All right.

Appreciate you being here. Have a great week. Later. You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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