She covers many aspects of product design, but the quote which really resonated with me was this -

Zoomed in -

This seems so applicable to many "services" these days. Millions spent on TV adverts, positive reviews, and glossy websites - yet nothing spent on customer care, and the entire shebang is held together with yarn.

Imagine if politicians had to actually deliver on what they promised, or if companies invested as much in customer service as they did advertising.

In many ways, this is about love. You have to love your customers. Advertising is merely seduction.

What would you do in order to seduce the object of your desires? Flowers, weekend trips to Paris, wearing a new fragrance, charming their parents - you know the drill! Then, the day after you get married, you suddenly switch - no time for your new partner; you're busy chasing other floozies! And if they don't have the bills paid on time, you'll drop them like a hot potato!

I don't really know how we fix this problem. Vendor Relationship Management is perhaps the best solution. If you see that other people have had poor service once they've signed up, you'd be less likely to become a customer.

Well, in theory! Think about all the problems that Apple have with their products - and all the complaints on their forums which go unanswered. Yet consumers - like lovestruck teenagers - wail "they really love me! I don't care what anyone else says! I can change them!"

Perhaps the only solution is to lower our expectations.

It's time to accept that companies just aren't that in to us! We must not be fooled by the cheap bunch of flowers they hand us on the first date - we have to anticipate the years of unrelenting misery they will surely put us through and brace ourselves for it.

Facebook have been spamming my wall with all sorts of rubbish - dodgy share trading deals, timeshare scams, PPI reclaim cons, malicious Android apps - really bottom of the barrel stuff.

So, as I'm too weak-willed to abandon Facebook, I've started retaliating. At a basic level, I block the stories as spam. That, hopefully, blocks them from appearing again. I file abuse reports which, hopefully, take up a little bit of Facebook's time.

Mainly, though, I complain to the company - especially if it's a UK one. I write on their wall saying that I don't appreciate them spamming me. I leave "interesting" links on their posts letting others know what think of them. For example, when overpriced smoothie maker "Innocent" started spamming me, I reminded their followers that - far from being innocent - they had taken substantial investment from Coca-Cola. A company with business practices which don't exactly fit Innocent's image.

When BP spammed my wall, I contributed to theirs with videos about people protesting BP's greenwashing of the arts. I also shared the videos and articles with my friends.

I'm not alone in this, it seems. People love telling companies that they don't like their product or their spamming attitude.

This is what happened to Innocent when they started promoting their posts to people who didn't want to see them. (I've edited out some of the positive comments - but Innocent deleted my disparaging comments and blocked me from their page - so I think that's fair.)

It's often said that customers prefer telling each other bad news about a company rather than good. What happens when every supposedly positive "sponsored story" gets users telling their friends just how much they despise a spamming brand?

The meme-du-jour is "If you're not paying, that means you're not the customer; you're the product." We are the product being sold and some of us don't like it.

That's the premise of my wife's most recent blog post.

It asks a rather simple and quite unnerving question. What happens when the "product" starts rebelling?

Facebook might not like this attitude, but they made the decision to design a business which sells rational, self interested agents in the first place. If they didn’t want their ‘product’ to rebel against them they shouldn’t have gone into the business of selling something which has a brain. Liz Eden

I've been told that Facebook won't offer people a way to pay to opt out of advertising. The people who can afford to pay are the ones which advertisers are desperate to target. Will there, I wonder, come a time when the negative publicity generated by resentful products offsets the gains from selling us?