Proof that some marketeers really were in a meeting when the brains were handed out comes from South Korean car maker Hyundai, which ran an ad for its zero-emissions vehicle showing a motorist’s failed attempt to gas himself from the exhaust fumes.

The ad was pulled after complaints from people whose relatives had killed themselves in this way, and after it was described as “utterly insensitive”, “vile” and “disgusting”.

Hyundai have apologised “unreservedly” for the ad they were happy to approve.

Supermarkets deliberately copy the packaging of major brands for their own-label versions, a study by consumer group Which? has found.

More than 150 own-label products from stores such as Tesco, Aldi, Lidl, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Asda were designed to look like brands such as Jacob’s Cream Crackers, Kellog’s Coco Pops, Lurpak butter, Radox bath gel and McVities Digestives. Boots and Superdrug also copied the packaging of leading brands.

Nearly 20% of shoppers deliberately buy an own-label because it looks like the brand it is copying, and a similar number do so accidentally, it has been found.

Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket, have lost £1.2billion in a failed attempt to get into the American grocery market.

The decision to close its Fresh & Easy stores came after annual profits fell by more than 50% in a retail landscape very different from the UK, as the company’s marketeers would have known.

Following rising numbers of customers shopping online, Tesco are also scrapping more than 100 planned store developments in the UK, plans for which they had already acquired land at a cost of £804 million, and with the help of their well-paid lobbyist Lord Hill, the leader of our impartial House of Lords. (See Issue 31, DAVY PULLS IT OFF)

Meanwhile the murky world of football has scored an own-goal with the revelation that Liverpool player Luis Suarez bites his opponents and that his team management, and his fans, think the 10-match ban for the biting imposed by the FA is too harsh.

The incident has polarised opinion with some claiming that his footballing skills should absolve him from punishment for his occasional lapses and others that the FA should eat his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

It is presumably open to other football clubs, perhaps more morally aware than Liverpool, to refuse to play a Liverpool line-up that includes Suarez. Question is, would the FA back them if they did?

Some amusing counters to the cold-callers selling over the telephone were suggested in a recent issue of the Daily Telegraph, and these included versions of the following :-

o Be excessively friendly. Thank them for calling, ask how they are, what sort of day they are having, if the sun is shining in Mumbai etc, and then switch to nasty and say you hope they aren’t one of those creeps who pretend friendliness to sell something. Continue reading →

This is the view of PR practitioner, and kiss-n-tell tabloid story specialist Max Clifford, 70, who has been charged with 11 counts of indecent assault on 7 teenage girls aged 14 to 19 over the period 1966 to 1985.

The charges are part of Operation Yewtree, launched by the Met in the wake of the Savile revelations, and are denied by Clifford.

Good to see that David Cameron’s controversial choice of highly-paid lobbyist Lord Hill as leader of the House of Lords has been so roundly vindicated.

As revealed by the Daily Telegraph and despite mutterings of conflicts of interest Tesco’s lobbyist Hill has already rightly intervened, purely on a matter of the highest moral and ethical principles of course, to support plans to sell off the country’s state school playing fields to, er, Tesco, a paymaster of his that badly needs some good luck following the equine PR disaster.

Some may carp but for our part it’s good to know that, courtesy of our Davy, and in this great democracy that is the UK, we now have the finest House of Lords money can buy.

Arguably one of the reputations most damaged by the horsemeat affair is that of retailer Iceland, which uses the advertising claim FOOD YOU CAN TRUST, clearly something a tad optimistic when the state of the current supply chain of the supermarkets is considered.

Iceland’s chief executive Malcom Walker did his firm, or his industry few favours when he blamed schools, prisons, councils and hospitals for wanting the cheapest possible meat and therefore encouraging suppliers to break the law. He also claimed that supermarkets like his own should not be blamed for failing to test for horsemeat in products being sold by them as something else saying “Why should we? We don’t test for hedgehog either”.

A few weeks before the story broke Iceland were reassuring customers with complaints about their products “We regularly monitor our suppliers to check that they’re upholding our high standards”.

Police forces have been caught selling confidential details of road accident victims to insurance companies, claims management companies and ambulance- chasing lawyers.

The referral fees earned by one force, the Met, amounted to more than £5 million since 2009 and represented more than 10,000 people subsequently pestered to make a personal injury claim, one saying that he had been contacted 340 times.

Referral fees, which have greatly increased the cost of motor insurance, and the income of Police forces, will become illegal in April.