Well, another week has gone by where circumstances were such that I did not get the time I wanted for AR blogging. However, I thought that some members might find this post interesting. As many of you know, prior to inspection, I worked as an engineer and finally the manager and owner of a radio broadcast station. In those 30 plus years, I spent my time in marketing. Broadcast marketing, while different in some ways, had many similarities to online marketing. This post refers to marketing jingles. You know, those little, often annoying, tunes that go with advertising for businesses or radio station promotion. You still hear those today with some of the online streaming ads. Due to the cost of having a jingle produced, they often go with larger operations. In the early 1970's, I was involved in producing some of these jingles for clients. This is amazing, even to me, but a few of those jingles are still being played today by those same merchants -- a heating contractor and a car dealer come to mind. Just hearing the jingles makes me mentally go back to being 23 years old again. Music, even bad music, can do that. We tend to subliminally remember dates that go with songs. Jingles work or businesses would not spend so much money on them. And sometimes the more annoying they are, the better they are remembered.

 A side bar to this post involves the name of my own firm: King of the House Home Inspection, Inc. My wife came up with the name years ago, because she remembered the classic Roger Miller tune of the 1960's King of the Road. She thought that it was a good name for an inspection firm, with that change, and I liked it too. Apparently many of my clients know the tune too because, the funny thing is, quite often, when I look at checks made out to the firm, they will be made out to "King of the Road." Thankfully, the bank has a sense of humor and cashes them anyway. Even though I never paid for a jingle, I think my firm name is close enough to that classic song title that, if the clients are old enough at least, they associate King of the Road with King of the House.

Thanks for looking.

Steven L. Smith

www.kingofthehouse.com