A Shot of Reality
I had a moment of pause late last night after my plane landed at Newark airport in New Jersey. It’s funny how quickly a lovely vacation can end the very second you’re back in cellphone range.
One of my voice mail messages was from the marketing director at a shipyard that builds megayachts. “I want to talk to you about your article,” she said, referring to a piece I recently wrote about a charter yacht that’s under construction. “We found a lot of it to be, well, kind of derogatory.”
The voice mail threw me because the article I wrote was not intended to be derogatory at all. It was a story about the process of building a better, more sophisticated charter yacht than this particular shipyard had ever before attempted–and about a lot of the growing pains that go along with that kind of undertaking.
I called the marketing director back, and I listened to her concerns carefully. I asked her if anything in the article was inaccurate; she said no. I asked her if anyone had been misquoted; she said no. I asked her if she felt I’d gotten the story wrong in any way; she said no, adding that I’d captured what was happening at the yard with more detail than any other writer ever had. She said she thought the world of me and couldn’t wait to have me back out to the shipyard to write another story in the future.
Finally, I asked her to help me understand how–given all that–anyone could feel the article was derogatory.
Her reply was telling: “I guess we just see so much marketing fluff in the boating magazines these days, that when somebody prints reality, it really hits you like a slap in the face.”
She went on to add that in hindsight, her choice of the word “derogatory” may have been unfair. She might’ve chosen the word “real” instead–which is something that’s good for readers, even if it’s not standard operating procedure at a lot of boating magazines these days.
I mention this to you readers of CharterWave because I want you to understand just how revolutionary our reporting here on the website really is. If you want to find information you can trust–real information about charter brokers, companies, crew and yachts that you simply will not read anywhere else–then we are the only game in town. Actually, in the entire world.
We’re not out “to get” anybody, but we certainly aren’t repeating anybody’s sugar-coated marketing messages, either. We simply print the truth about what we find, fair and square, all with an eye toward helping you find the best charter brokers, boats, crews and companies to work with when planning your next vacation.
And we’re ready to take whatever nervous marketing director phone calls come along with that. In fact, we look forward to it.
In this case, at least, we ended up adding yet another fan.