MarketingDad.com

This is the worst feeling I’ve had in my entire life and I don’t wish it to anyone.

Yesterday evening while I was sitting at my computer when I received a call from my wife, who was at a shopping center at the time. She said she had lost and couldn’t find Ricky, my 8 year old son and that I should call my in-laws who have a friend that works at the police ASAP.

SWOOSH, all my blood flushed out of my body and then back in. I started thinking about perverts, kidnappers, what my life would be without one of my kids, all in a split second. It really is incredible how fast all these things go through your head in no time.

So I grabbed my cell phone jumped on the car and called my mother inlaw while I started driving to the shopping center. About 2 blocks away from my house I get a call from my wife telling me hey had found him. So I take a deep breath, thank God and go back home. I made myself a tea and as I sat down I started shaking and I got all these weird feelings, relief, sadness, happiness I think I started assimilating what could have happened in that moment. It took a couple of hours to calm down back to normal but eventually we all did.
The whole thing happened because my 8 year old son wanted to go to the bathroom and my wife was almost at the cash register with my 4 year old so she told him to go and rush back. What she didn’t know is that he wanted to do #2 and when he took longer than expected she rushed to look for him and they most probably crossed paths and didn’t see each other.

The point of all of this is:
Take good care of your kids, have plans for this type of situations, not kidnaps but what you’ll do and what they should do when they get lost and discuss them with you children. It’s very important to repeat the rules to them when they go out with friends AND tell the friends parent about this. We take so much care of them with they are with us and sometimes we forget to tell the people who are with them to take as much care as wee would.

And to pull a marketing lesson out of this I’ll just say that uncertainty and confusion are terrible for a child a parent AND for your customers too. So if they arrive at your site and aren’t clear on what it’s about and what they should do, they’ll just walk away to avoid the uncertainty. They shouldn’t have to think on what they have to do next, it should be as easy and as natural as possible to follow the flow of your page until they complete the desired action.
So there you go I managed to get something good out of this.

Have a great weekend

Richard