Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?
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@quixoticjeremy said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
We were driving by and could not help laughing for the longest time. Clearly there is no way to know what they meant. Dominica at first thought that the apostrophe was the issue and that it was meant to be "2 months free". But I pointed out that this is unlikely and what is probably missing is the "nd" from the 2 making it "2nd month's free" or "2nd month IS free." That's far more likely. Neither will hold up if you demand your free month or two free months as it does not guarantee either.
Dominica kept trying to come up with any way for it to be a legit statement. The only thing we arrived at was that someone with the name "2 Month" was now free and they were throwing a party for him.
Hey there was 2 pac, why not 2 month?
That's what we said!
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WTF is a Pac? A month is at least a thing.
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@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I just see that apostrophe error so many times, I assume thats the error.
In marketing? Seeing it anywhere else doesn't apply here.
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@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I still the intention is to give 2 free months as part of the lease. I see this a lot.
Why? Based on what?
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@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I just see that apostrophe error so many times, I assume thats the error.
In marketing? Seeing it anywhere else doesn't apply here.
Uh, if you consider signs for businesses marketing, then yes, I see it in lots of local marketing.
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@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I just see that apostrophe error so many times, I assume thats the error.
In marketing? Seeing it anywhere else doesn't apply here.
Uh, if you consider signs for businesses marketing, then yes, I see it in lots of local marketing.
If I consider an ad campaign to be marketing? Of course it is marketing. How much more marketing can it get?
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@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I just see that apostrophe error so many times, I assume thats the error.
In marketing? Seeing it anywhere else doesn't apply here.
Uh, if you consider signs for businesses marketing, then yes, I see it in lots of local marketing.
And you see it and you know that in cases where it totally removes any specific meaning like this that it means the one that favours you and not the business - totally the opposite of how all other marketing works?
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@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I still the intention is to give 2 free months as part of the lease. I see this a lot.
Why? Based on what?
Again, based on probability of error.
I mean, in theory, it could really have supposed to be 1 month and they erred and put 2.
The likely answer is that, since apostrophe's are used so infrequently wrong, that is the intention.
Could it be anything else? Yes.
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@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I still the intention is to give 2 free months as part of the lease. I see this a lot.
Why? Based on what?
Again, based on probability of error.
I mean, in theory, it could really have supposed to be 1 month and they erred and put 2.
The likely answer is that, since apostrophe's are used so infrequently wrong, that is the intention.
Could it be anything else? Yes.
But this is marketing. The same logic says that this is consistent with standard strategies to trick consumers into exactly the kind of response you just gave. So while lots of people make this error normally, marketing does this intentionally all of the time to elicit the exact "but they must have meant" response you gave.
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I see were Scott is going here but this is one of those situations where I do not believe that there is the ultra intelligent word smithing genius in marketing going on in this situation.
This simply appears to be someone who has no command of the English language making a sign.
To that and I remain with my current opinion. Please feel free to stop at that location and acquire to prove who is right or wrong. -
@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
I see were Scott is going here but this is one of those situations where I do not believe that there is the ultra intelligent word smithing genius in marketing going on in this situation.
There is no word smithing. This is the exact same thing we always go through. This is super basic every day marketing and your reaction to it is exactly what marketers expect. There is an emotional drive to explain simple marketing in crazy terms. This is the same reaction that makes people sure that AT&T guaranteed unlimited or whatever.
I did nothing here. Any word smithing is on your side. I pointed out that two possibilities are equal and that one has marketing behind it and one does not. You smithed to say that the one that favours you must be the case, even though this flies in the face of common sense and all experience.
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@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
This simply appears to be someone who has no command of the English language making a sign.
Right, so you fell for the marketing. That's all you've explained there. This is EXACTLY what I said this sign was likely designed to do.
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Scott, please settle down. I was not accusing you of wordsmithing. I was saying that I do not believe that the marketers in this particular situation or wordsmithers.
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@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
To that and I remain with my current opinion. Please feel free to stop at that location and acquire to prove who is right or wrong.
I guarantee that won't release that until there is a contract. But it's like you've never rented an apartment before. This is a common tactic. People get caught by this stuff all of the time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
This simply appears to be someone who has no command of the English language making a sign.
Right, so you fell for the marketing. That's all you've explained there. This is EXACTLY what I said this sign was likely designed to do.
And tell you call them up or visit them and find out the reality of the situation you do not know that.
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@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
Scott, please settle down. I was not accusing you of wordsmithing. I was saying that I do not believe that the marketers in this particular situation or wordsmiths.
If the people behind all this money and marketing are not word smiths, then there is a nearly 50/50 chance as to what the sign means. There are three ways to look at this statistically.....
- Getting the second month free is WAY more likely than getting two months free. Financially, this is just the much more likely scenario.
- Yes, in non-marketing scenarios people use apostrophes for plurals all of the time. Agreed. But people leave out "nd" all of the time, too. Both are common mistakes. One happens more because it is used more. Applying that logic in reverse here is bad statistics and isn't how predictions work.
- Given that you are probably just as likely to have someone make the "nd" mistake as make the "apostrophe" mistake if presenting with equal numbers of each scenario that they are expected to write, we arrive at roughly equal chances of meaning. But point #1 shifts that.
- Any marketing prowess or wordsmithing then apply on top of this.
Using statistics and common sense, I don't see how we could arrive at the apostrophe being the more likely scenario. A possible one, yes. But if you think about how you arrive there, rather than trying to work backwards from commonly seen mistakes, I don't think it makes logical sense in the way that you feel that it does.
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@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@dashrender said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
This simply appears to be someone who has no command of the English language making a sign.
Right, so you fell for the marketing. That's all you've explained there. This is EXACTLY what I said this sign was likely designed to do.
And tell you call them up or visit them and find out the reality of the situation you do not know that.
No, but it is basic adulting that you have to assume so. This is the most standard trick in marketing and the one we talk about and point out constantly. Why do you feel this is a special case and not like every other apartment building, restaurant, car shop and business of every type? Why is this one special when we know that this is the stock approach to making you react the as if what they said isn't what they meant?
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Dollars to donuts, when it comes to guaranteeing financial payouts on a large scale, someone double checked the sign. There is a lot of money on the table here. If they have 100 units, and this is $800/mo. Getting that sign wrong is $80,000. You really think no one proofed it?
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@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
Dollars to donuts, when it comes to guaranteeing financial payouts on a large scale, someone double checked the sign. There is a lot of money on the table here. If they have 100 units, and this is $800/mo. Getting that sign wrong is $80,000. You really think no one proofed it?
Have you driven through America?
NOTE: I know you have.
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@brrabill said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
@scottalanmiller said in Who is Two Month and Why Was He Imprisoned?:
Dollars to donuts, when it comes to guaranteeing financial payouts on a large scale, someone double checked the sign. There is a lot of money on the table here. If they have 100 units, and this is $800/mo. Getting that sign wrong is $80,000. You really think no one proofed it?
Have you driven through America?
NOTE: I know you have.
Yes, and I know how often this exact marketing technique is used and how insanely effective it is. So they can do this with a predictable response to the point that people will actually defend what is trivially a psychological manipulation technique as a simple mistake. It's become standard practice in America to apply "idiocy" to "smart marketing". Regardless of how often it is demonstrated that people are being manipulated into that exact emotional response in that exact same way.
