UPS and DHL rejoice!

I fancy myself something of a marketing guy. As such, I can appreciate a clever marketing or promotional idea. It also doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize when a company has missed the boat big time or possibly even shot themselves in the foot.

The latest glaring example of a marketing OOPS! is from our good friends at FedEx. Seems the company that had no problem being featured prominently in a movie where Tom Hanks talks to a volleyball, is all bent out of shape cuz a guy in Arizona has engineered all the furniture in his apartment out of free FedEx boxes.

Yea, they issued a cease & desist letter to poor Jose, when they could have had a buttload (that's a metric unit of marketing measurement) of fun, positive and interesting press for a couple of months.

In fact, knowing full well that Jose was gonna get some pub out of his design skillz, an unknown (at least to me) mattress company called Dormia sent him a free mattress so he didn't have to sleep on boxes. Freakin' BRILLIANT! And another company HighBrowFurniture.comsent him a free lamp.

Perhaps there are a couple openings in the FedEx PR department I should look into...