TurboTax is Good Enough For Treasury Secretary Designate Geithner
- Posted by Ephraim Cohen on January 22nd, 2009 filed in Product Marketing, Reputation Management
- Comments
What’s better than a Presidential Appointee plugging a product? Is it still valuable if it was in a negative context?
We usually cover more gadget oriented developments. However, while watching Senate hearings for Treasury Secretary-designate, Timothy Geithner, he mentioned he used TurboTax to prepare his taxes back when he neglected to pay some taxes.
To his credit, Geithner made it clear that the mistake was on his end and not a problem with the software. So is it a plug for TurboTax and legal and financial software in general? Or is it a plug for using people? I often hear questions as to good these software packages compared to human help. While I do value real people (and have an accountant with a beating heart), the fact that the probably head of all things tax-related felt that a software package was good enough for him lends an enormous amount of credibility to the idea of expertise being built into software. It will be interesting to see if TurboTax can leverage this given the context in which the comment was made. On the other hand, we could see accounting firms putting that video in a commercial and saying “if only had a person helping him…” I’m sure the marketing folks are discussing it right now.
Here’s the video. The Turbotax mention is toward the end (and worth watching):
