Marketing Matters Nov/Dec 2015 ISSUE 47

MORE LEMONS Back in the day in the USA, when car-buyers generally trusted Volkswagen, the company was highly praised in marketing and advertising circles for …

MISS SOMEONE’S CANCER AND GET A REWARD Doctors are being paid bribes for not referring their patients to hospital specialists, it has emerged. The bribes are being …

MOST AND LEAST CORRUPT According to the Transparency Intenational Corruption Perception Index list, which ranks 175 countries by levels of corruption, the most …

THOSE SNEAKY BANKS AGAIN Banks are anxious to get everyone using contactless debit cards, despite the proven problems of accidental charging and high fraud risk, so …

PARLIAMENTARY POODLE? The Parliamentary standards watchdog has criticised Channel 4 and The Daily Telegraph for unfairly tarnishing the reputations of Malcolm …

CLAMPDOWN ON BENT MARKETING Amazon are taking 1,114 people to court who they say have been paid to write fake reviews to boost customer confidence in …

SHARE THIS AROUND Another online scam going around, and hacking into people’s email accounts to do it, is designed to encourage those who would like to make …

MORE LEMONS

Back in the day in the USA, when car-buyers generally trusted Volkswagen, the company was highly praised in marketing and advertising circles for its refreshingly honest 1960 Lemon advertisement.

This black and white ad showed a VW Beetle with the word “Lemon” underneath, and explained that rigorous inspection procedures rejected around one in fifty Beetles, sometimes for something as minor as a small scratch on the windscreen or a blemish on chrome, and that VW called these rejected cars Lemons. The sign-off was “We pluck the lemons; you get the plums”. Continue reading

MISS SOMEONE’S CANCER AND GET A REWARD

Doctors are being paid bribes for not referring their patients to hospital specialists, it has emerged.

The bribes are being paid by some NHS clinical commissioning groups, such as in Lambeth and North East Lincolnshire, who deny that their actions could undermine patient trust in doctors, or compromise needed medical care. The bribes apply to referrals by doctors for cancer diagnosis. Continue reading

MOST AND LEAST CORRUPT

According to the Transparency Intenational Corruption Perception Index list, which ranks 175 countries by levels of corruption, the most corrupt in the world are Somalia and North Korea at the bottom of the table at joint 174th. Moving up the list, at 173rd is Sudan, followed by Afghanistan (172) South Sudan (171) Iraq (170) Turkmenistan (169) and Uzbekistan, Libya and Eritrea at joint 166th. The least corrupt, at the top of the table is Denmark in first position, followed by New Zealand (2) Finland (3) Sweden (4) Norway and Switzerland at joint 5th, followed by Singapore, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Canada in 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th places. Continue reading

THOSE SNEAKY BANKS AGAIN

Banks are anxious to get everyone using contactless debit cards, despite the proven problems of accidental charging and high fraud risk, so that their marketeers can collect valuable information on their customer’s spending habits, to be sold on.

An editorial piece by Ross Clark in the Daily Mail – “Creepy reason banks want us all to have ‘tap and pay’ cards” – pointed out the ease with which researchers at Which? magazine were able to obtain a card reader, place it where someone’s wallet would pass within a few centimetres of it and then use the name and card number collected to buy a £3,000 television set, despite assurances from the banks that the maximum anyone would be able to take was £20. Continue reading

PARLIAMENTARY POODLE?

The Parliamentary standards watchdog has criticised Channel 4 and The Daily Telegraph for unfairly tarnishing the reputations of Malcolm Rifkind (Conservative) and Jack Straw (Labour). Both politicians were caught in a sting earlier this year in which they thought they were going to make a lot of money by selling their knowledge of governments, and their ability to influence them, to Chinese business interests. (See Marketing Matters, Issue 43, March/April 2015, JACK GOES UNDER THE RADAR) Continue reading

CLAMPDOWN ON BENT MARKETING

Amazon are taking 1,114 people to court who they say have been paid to write fake reviews to boost customer confidence in products and services, aspects that Amazon says tarnishes their image.

The action, launched in Seattle USA, follows Amazon’s successful legal actions in April against four websites offering positive reviews for sale.

SHARE THIS AROUND

Another online scam going around, and hacking into people’s email accounts to do it, is designed to encourage those who would like to make around £100,000 a year from easy share-dealing from home to sign up for a £200 scheme that uses, they say “a patented mathematical algorithm that was developed especially for binary options trading” to accurately predict shares likely to make a profit for those buying them. Continue reading

Event Organisers Update November 2015 ISSUE 134

AN UGLY FACE OF TOURISM Tourists being killed does seem to bring out the worst in people in our tourism industry. Egypt’s tourism minister Hisham Zaazou is a case in …

AND OTHERS Criticism of the way Thomas Cokk handled the deaths of two of its young customers by carbon monoxide poisoning at one of its chosen hotels in Corfu continues …

SUN, SEA, SAND AND SEAWEED Meanwhile some other tourist economies are seriously under threat down on some of the lovely beaches of the Caribbean, where …

YOUR PRIVATE JET AWAITS One recent development that could make flying less of a depressing experience, and travel more of an incentive for VIP groups, is a private jet …

HAIR TODAY… Clumps of hair, type unspecified, in the plughole was the complaint about hotels mentioned by 86% of respondents in a survey of 600 members of the public by …

EXCURSIONS Excursions 2016, the exhibition of options for those organising group travel takes place at Alexander Palace, London, on Saturday January 23 2016…

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD An example of a film that was higher-rated by the public than the critics was the 1967 John Schlesinger adaption of Thomas Hardy’s rural …

AN UGLY FACE OF TOURISM

Tourists being killed does seem to bring out the worst in people in our tourism industry.

Egypt’s tourism minister Hisham Zaazou is a case in point, claiming that the recent cancellation of all UK flights into and out of Sharm El-Sheikh by our Government is “unjustified”. The emergency and completely justified move follows the crash of Russian Airbus A321 in Sinai on Saturday October 31st shortly after leaving Sharm El-Sheikh for St Petersburg, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board. Concerns that a bomb might have been secreted on the flight have led to completely understandable concerns about security at Sharm El-Sheik airport, hence the cancellation of flights, for the ultimate safety of passengers, until this can be assessed by experts. Currently the flight recorder has recorded an explosion on board. Continue reading