One week after purchasing a used vehicle I received an advertisement from the dealership’s Internet team asking me to check out the inventory of their brand new Phillipsburg lot so I could test drive and purchase a used vehicle. I had just handed over thousands of dollars to them.  This disconnect between the dealer’s Internet and offline marketing & sales functions really put me off from a personal perspective.

But from the perspective of the rebeccArtful experiment, I was intrigued.  Web analytics provides the data needed to integrate a business’ online communication with more traditional offline methods, including TV, print, radio, and face-to-face meetings.  But even if companies have the ability to collect data, do they know what to do with it?  This car dealership doesn’t appear to get it.  Their people aren’t communicating.  And they are also very possibly clinging to erroneous perceptions of customer behavior.  I conducted research on their website during the same time period I negotiated with the sales consultant on the phone and face-to-face.

In his book Web Analytics 2.0, web analyst Avinash Kaushik explains “we no longer live in a world that differentiates offline marketing from online marketing; we live in a world of nonline marketing (a phrase coined by David Hughes).”  Today, customer decisions are made using a combination of methods.  For example, a person reads an article about a product in a trade magazine, conducts research on the Internet, goes to a store to handle various products, returns to the Internet to compare pricing, then returns to a store for final questions with a sales consultant and makes a purchase.  Companies need to figure out how to use information accrued from numerous channels.  A shift to the nonline marketing model “goes against the grain of everything we have been taught so far; it messes with our comfort level,” says Kaushik.

When my grandmother, an award-winning seamstress, asked how I was doing with the curtains I purchased for my living room, I told her “I just hung them up and they were the right length.”  In her typical dry manner she said “Oh, design by dumb luck.”

I apply this sentiment to my forays in plumbing.  Dumb luck was present when I put together the new fancy shmancy kitchen faucet.  I assembled all thirty pieces, but only after piecing together instructions in the faucet box with another set of instructions found on the Internet.  Dumb luck was also present when the sink pipes had to be reconfigured, since I had designed my counters to be 3” deeper than before.  After 10 days, that little leak near the p-trap gradually did clog itself, just as the man from Home Depot said it would.  But where was dumb luck when my dishwasher connection leaked?

Sometimes you just luck out.  Other times, your luck just runs out.

During my home remodeling adventures, my most notable realizations in physics involved removing kitchen cabinets and transporting wood.

Uncle Ted received my phone call of bewilderment one day when I was preparing to haul down a cabinet for refinishing.  “I can only find 3 screws!”  I had a friend whose cabinets crashed down in the middle of the night at her Brooklyn apartment.  Surely there was something else supporting all this weight which wasn’t used in my friend’s kitchen?  But no.  And my Uncle patiently explained I must stuff mounds of pillows underneath them, mindful to increase the height nearest me so I’m not crushed when the last screw is loosened and the cabinet falls down.  I found they were 5” screws, and they were firmly entrenched in the studs.   Wow.

Sticking a 12-foot piece of base molding out the passenger window of my station wagon to transport it up the highway provided additional insights to physics.  If you must do it, don’t exceed 45 mph.  Enough said.