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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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.