Do you like being telemarketed at? I’m sure there is a proper lump of jargon, but I can’t be bothered to find out.

I spend a lot of time writing in my home office. Do know what I hear sometimes up to six or eight times a day? Our home phone ringing with telemarketing calls. And that’s on a line that’s registered with the appropriate opt-out body. On bad days, I just put the line straight on to voice mail.

But what does this kind of barrage of calls say about the companies involved? I think it says they couldn’t give a stuff about the people they’re phoning – butting in to their lives just because they want to sell double glazing or credit card insurance. It says they have products and services that they can’t sell in any less pressurized fashion. It says someone has discovered cheap offshore call centres in many cases.

You know what? It works both ways. I do my best to keep a mental note of the perpetrators. I then avoid them like the plague.

It seems I’m not the only person who thinks this way. I was listening to Seth Godin et al’s The Big Moo the other day. He mentioned a successful US-based financial services organization that doesn’t do telemarketing.

More power to their elbow!

There was a cause for celebration last week in the Rosam household. My wife won a whole case of wine in a competition!

It turned out to be a budget case from a well-known online supplier of wine, one that we occasionally order from anyway.

So far, so good. We’ve drunk one OK bottle of white and a red. It’s absolutely the worst bottle of wine I’ve sampled in the last 10 years. I thought the Italians had long stopped making that kind of nasty, acidic, thin, chemical-tasting bilge water.

They obviously haven’t. The wine wasn’t off. It was just undrinkable.

Am I being ungrateful? Maybe.

But I think there’s a salutary marketing point here. The two companies involved have shot themselves in the foot. By sending out a budget case of wine with poor quality contents, we don’t feel very well disposed to either the competition runner or the wine supplier – why should I let them make the choices for me on a purchase, when they obviously believe this stuff is acceptable and should be enjoyed as wine?

So, the upshot is that I’m left wondering if to ever bother again with an order from that supplier. I’m not going to identify the company at this stage, because I want to see what the rest of the case is like – I also think there’s another bottle of the vile stuff sitting in our wine rack, so we’ll see if there was something wrong with the first bottle.

The general point I’m making is that if you’re going to give away a freebie, make sure it’s something that will enhance your relationship with the recipient, not jeopardize it.