But it's not a support trick, it's a "the executive team doesn't want to look embarrassed." Writing the executive team isn't some trick to get real support, it

But it's not a support trick, it's a "the executive team doesn't want to look embarrassed." Writing the executive team isn't some trick to get real support, it's something that people figured out you could do and that executives would give vague responses to in order to save face; having seen the end result of a "write the CEO", usually the executive response is just a vague "make this go away", and the "how" of that is left to the imagination of the reader. Please understand that it's highly doubtful that there is any official policy on what to do with support emails received at the executive level; the end result is that the person who wrote the email gets what they want, but it's not because the executive put any thought into the actual situation, it's because they just wanted an annoying person to go away and wanted to avoid bad PR. That's all this is, a quick cost-benefit analysis of "what does doing nothing cost me here?" for some executive. For each story you read where writing the executive helps, probably there are a dozen (if not far more) met with radio silence. I've seen customers write the CEO when they were flagrantly and intentionally violating our licensing policy in hopes that the CEO would change something. I've seen them write our product VP because the customer felt they were entitled to salary compensation for the duration while an issue they had with our product was investigated. Writing the CEO isn't a way to get basic problems fixed, it's a gamble that your particular issue and the circumstances around it are a big enough PR problem that the normal channels of raising concerns aren't enough.