Entertainment For Lively Minds
Does anyone in The Massive work in marketing?
Posted by ganglesprocket on 23 February 2011 - 10:53am.
Then you need to watch this. Then possibly kill yourself.
A more hateful parade of appalling smug shit I have never seen.
Ah An Old Queen Song...
We will we will block you!! Hate the suggestion that they will sell my info on and on - You buy something on Amazon for Aunty Nelly and they then think they know you.
Kids, relax
When you grow up, you'll be too busy keeping your heads above water at work and at home to give a fuck about any of this stuff.
Oh, and being this narcissistic at 8 might just be considered cute. At 25 you're going to get a slap.
Bill Hicks was spot on...
Life-sapping shit.
As is often the case, you got there first
but i had this rant in mind instead:
I personally think the fat ginger with the bubble perm should be sent up the chimneys or ran through looms.
Both of you ahead of me...
But as soon as I saw the clip ganglesprocket posted, my mind was drawn irresistibly to the great man, so here's his riff on marketing, for those not familiar:
Forgive my inability to cite definitive sources
but doesn't one of the books about him suggest that for all his anti-marketing swagger he was very interested in how well his gigs and CDs were promoted and sold? And that he would raise hell if he thought it wasn't done well? Who did he think did that? The stand-up comedy pixies?
!
Marketeers - speaking ill of the dead for their own advancement since Marketing began....
I think the book I mentioned
was written either by someone who worked with him or was a close friend, not a marketer.
Non-marketers - talking arse for the amusement of others since the Internet began... :)
Marketeers.....
not really having any concrete information to go on, but not letting that get in the way of attempting to add weight to what is, fundamentally, a point of view, since - ooh, a happier time, doubtless.
I've read and seen most things
about Bill and I don't recall that at all.
He was pissed that he was virtually unrecognised as the gifted comic in his native land wheras sold out theatres in the UK but thats understandable. And that was down to word of mouth and Channel 4 taking a punt and showing his stand up on TV.
Shouldn't the question be,
"Does anyone in 'marketing' actually do any work?"?
Don't marketing people just sit around all day, either making spreadsheets reveal what they want them to reveal ("spend another million on marketing") or dreaming up crap ("being creative")?
*repairs to cave*
Christ almighty,
I suddenly feel very old, what in God's name are they talking about and shouldn't they be doing some homework anyway ?
Yeah,
shouldn't they be at school or building dens or something.
Marketing?
Pedaling crap that nobody wants by appealing to people's innate sense of fear. Now there's a noble calling. Bugger off and learn to do something useful.
Marketing
But everything is marketed, by marketeers. The NHS, Oxfam, the food you eat, the music you buy, the TV you watch, your local church, your children's school, The Word. It's not just about hipsters creating ludicrous TV campaigns.
"marketeers"!
I'm irresistably reminded of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and, er, the other one...
Dogtanian
?
Compare
the marketeer dot com.
It is
but the marketing is puffery and unloved (generally). The NHS isn't great or crap because of how it's marketed, is it? Same for everything else. Good stuff will find an audience eventually.
If people want to be in marketing, let them get on with it, but let's not pretend it's doing anything useful.
As for the idea that in attending an interview, that you are somehow marketing yourself - I don't agree in the slightest. The only way in which I could accept that viewpoint is in terms of - people who do well in interviews might be people who are good at interviews, as opposed to being good at the job. Which is to say, if it is marketing, it just makes it even worse, doesn't it?
Marketing can be letting people know what's available
and why they should think about using it.
As a careers service, we agonise over how to "market" all the support students can access for getting themselves into work after they leave us. They tell us (once they graduate without a job) that we should have told them and made them do something about it.
So, we persevere with finding imaginative ways of engaging people (not unlike those in the video) to do something now about something they'll thank us for later.
It can feel like a thankless task, but not when some bright graduate tells you they found their ideal job after reading a blog post you wrote or attending an event you ran (both "marketed" to within an inch of their lives).
The NHS
The NHS have a dedicated marketing department. They even have their own marketing website. You can follow them on Facebook. And Twitter. They have another website specifically devoted to their brand identity. Right now they're advertising for a Communications Manager/ Specialist and a Head of Marketing. All in all, I suspect the NHS consider it a vital part of what they do.
I don't agree with you
I agree that they have a marketing department, obviously. And website.
I suspect that certain people consider it to be a vital part of what the NHS do. I also suspect that the people we're talking about work in these very areas.
Money spent on marketing the NHS, for pity's sake, is money that's not being spent on the people who most people would call vital within the NHS.
Laboratory staff, surgeons, cleaners, nurses, physiotherapists.
Without these people, there would be no NHS. That's what vital means.
Without marketeers, there would stil be an NHS, only they'd have more money and less buggering about for the sake of it.
It's like the old Viz joke adverts, "Feeling poorly? Go to the hospital!". "In need of vitality? Give marketing a call".
I am, in case I'm not being very clear, fairly irritated by 'marketing'. Not so much as a concept, but by marketeers' insistence that what they do is more important than the things they market.
The best thing you could possibly say about an excellent marketeer would be that they could sell, say, "Coals to Newcastle". This implies conning people is a yardstick for success. This can only be a bad thing.
"conning people is a yardstick for success"
No it isn't. It's a recipe for failure certainly in the long term.
No product, service, institution whatever, whether it's Marmite, John Lewis or The Guardian succeeds by hoodwinking its customers. It succeeds if it tries to learn about what its customers might want from them; how it could improve whatever it does to appeal to them more; how to project itself in its best possible light to attract their attention. That's what marketing is. There's nothing wicked or dishonest about it necessarily.
This clip might be really annoying (and, as someone else has pointed out, unpleasantly aggressive) but all it's saying is that in future a brand wanting to communicate with its potential audience may need to do so in a different way, using different media.
It is
because if that's is the natural apex for the job description. The best marketeer could sell something to someone who has absolutely no need for it.
Give me an example of better marketing than that.
In the long run it'll be a disaster, of course it will. I'm not suggesting otherwise. I think marketing IS a disaster and I think it needs to stop, seeing as we're cutting back and we're all in the same boat. And what have you.
I don't need The Word
I discovered it because of marketing activity of some kind which persuaded me to buy something I didn't need.
I shall buy it no more. The scales have truly dropped from mine eyes.
If you want to act stupid, perhaps
you do it because it's been marketed to you, too?
How did people find Word? I found it on holiday, on a table by the pool - a couple of old issues.
Other mags I buy, I found them in Smiths, generally, looking in sections that appeal to me.
Do I need them? No. Do I like them? Yes. Do I buy them? Yes. Would marketing make any difference? No. Why? Because people lie when market researchers ask them questions.
That's the problem, people aren't honest with researchers. Get round that one with your sarcasm, which appears to be quite common around here, the minute anyone disagrees about marketing.
And when that one's been cleared up, along with your scales, if marketing people are so good at it, how come most people think marketing is a load of twaddle? How come marketeers can't market themselves any better than that? You don't hear anyone knocking cleaners, do you? Cleaning things is important and needs doing well. Nobody's justifying the concept of anything truly important - fire fighting, nursing, teaching. Why's that? Why are bankers and marketeers under fire and not other 'vital' services?
You don't need marketing, you don't need The Word. They're nice if you can afford them. Which means they're not vital. To my way of thinking.
I've said my piece - repeatedly - and that'll do me. I find the sarcasm about as useful, entertaining and valid as most marketing schemes.
And guess why
And guess why you " found them in Smiths, generally, looking in sections that appeal to me".
Because WH Smiths and magazine publishing companies have marketing departments that, amongst other things, think very carefully about where to place products. Your magazines "appeal to me" don't just happen to be in the same place by accident.
Again
you're just stretching the remit of what counts as marketing.
Music Magazines are together, because it makes sense and that isn't marketing.
Moles live underground, where worms and beetles are found. Presumably this is also no accident. It must be that 'Underground' has been marketed to moles as being some kind of habitat of their dreams?
Presumably, any sign, any sign at all equals 'marketing' to you. Perhaps clouds are natures way of marketing weather? Perhaps women with big tits are marketing breeding? Perhaps lions with big teeth are marketing fear?
Having 'sections' in newsagents isn't marketing any more than the Dewey Decimal System is marketing.
People aren't as stupid as marketeers like to imagine.
Marketeers like to justify to themselves that they're doing a worthwhile job. I don't blame them, who wants to think that they're making money doing something that nobody needs?
All I'm saying is, if it worries marketeers that much - that what they're doing is important - maybe they would be better off doing jobs that nobody questions the importance of?
No: what PHD are actually saying
to their prospective clients is that the future is too spooky and complex for their stupid old minds to deal with, and that only PHD can steer them through them the dark days because the marketspeak bullshit that scares the rest of us is just babytalk to their gamine protean, future-shaped brain-pods.
It hasn't gone viral in the trade because it's annoying (even though it clearly is), but because it's such a condescending miscalculation.
Fair point
I wasn't really trying to defend the advert or whatever it is, just challenging the blanket dismissal of "marketing" as something inherently wicked and dishonest. It goes without saying that a good deal of the industry is brimming with bullshit. And yes, these people are just touting for business.
Pax Romana, writing what I think...
...so I don't have to.
Yup, the PhD video (presumably pronounced 'fud') seems very much aimed at a generation of marketeers who are - and i apologise for the lapse into jargon - immersed in the old paradigm.
"Everything you know is redundant, wooo, scary scary, hire us or you're obsolete, woo, scary scary..."
With the youth growing up taking broadband, smartphones, touchscreens, wifi and all the rest of it for granted, marketing "things and services" at them will have to be done differently in the future, whether that's good things and services (someone mentioned career advice for students) or what many posters here think of as bad things and services (marketing being seen as another of Lucifer's pet projects, like its stablemate, advertising). PhD had said this in an especially irritating manner of course...
If PhD
make such an arse of marketing themselves that it makes me want to machine gun all the kids in that video I certainly wouldn't trust them if I had a brand to market. It also makes me think that, actually, they don't really understand the stuff that's being parrotted in the script either, just throwing some words together they heard the geeks (like me) using because they think they'll sound cool and sexy and impress the punters and other marketers.
Marketing is generally like emptying a septic tank, a necessary evil for most businesses, not hugely glamorous and done by mostly normal working people. It it is made annoying by some smug pisswizrds who think they're doing something of great and lasting historical import to the world. They're not: what they're doing is convincing people to buy things they might or might not really want, but usually don't need. It would be nice if those particular people would remove their heads from their alimentary canals from time to time to see what the world around them is like.
an NHS Marketing person speaks...
Hi Buxton (and every one else). I’d just like to say a few words here. I work for the NHS in Communications and Marketing.
Now, I partially agree with you; in an ideal world, NHS money should go to front-line workers – absolutely.
But a lot of these communications/marketing functions are essential and if someone doesn’t do them then it would be down to the doctors and nurses.
The NHS has had communications and marketing ever since it started in 1948, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done now than there was 60 years ago. How much of an outcry would there be if we found that doctors had to update their own websites? Or nurses having to write press releases and respond to media enquiries?
With regards to the stroke adverts, that is an example of Social Marketing, which is trying to get people to change their behaviour. Get people to know the symptoms of a stroke and you may help the person live longer.
It’s worked. Through a carefully planned campaign of TV adverts, posters etc, there has been over a 50% long-term increase on emergency calls around stroke; that’s a lot of potential lives saved.
Lives saved! From a bit of marketing and communication! That proves that if we can help people take good care of themselves in the first place then it’ll do a bit to reduce the overcrowded hospitals.
And that’s just on a national level. There is a lot of specialist targeted work that goes on in local areas, depending on what the issues are in those areas. A lot is targeted to deprived areas, if you don’t happen to live in those areas you wouldn’t see what goes on an the changes that are being made.
We’re all well aware that it doesn’t work for everything; few people are going to stop smoking because a poster tells them to. That’s why we don’t turn our attentions to that side of things anymore.
I have worked in numerous jobs in the private sector (journalism, finance) and I have to say that working for the NHS in this role is the hardest. It’s loads - and I mean LOADS – of work.
Like any part of the NHS, we’re understaffed which means that I’m doing effectively three people’s work at the moment. This means 10-hour days just to get the work done (no overtime paid there, by the way).
Finally, I should mention that there are voluntary redundancies coming up where I work; I have a wife and a daughter and a hefty mortgage but I know that if I go then a nurses job could be saved.
I think this goes to show that I (and my colleagues around the country) know that what we’re doing is not as “important” as the people on the coalface – you can’t just pin that badge on someone. I’m a human being, doing a badly paid job for the public good, just like the rest of the NHS. I don’t want to lose my job but I know that I at least have an outside chance of getting similar work outside of the NHS.
At last the voice of reason
End of debate.
The partially correct voice of reason
What I took away from that, especially the piece about the stroke campaign, is that of a Communications function, NOT Marketing.
And I think some definition brings clarity to the issue:
Communications - propagation of a message designed to inform/educate.
Marketing - seeking to promote brand/differentiate product in a marketplace against the competition.
If BUPA had done the stroke campaign in an effort to drag business from UnitedHelathcare, then I'd be tempted to call that Marketing.
But they don't have competition. They aren't seeking to create a brand identity, or differentiate their product or service offering. They're educating/creating awareness. "Marketing" an idea, perhaps - but not "marketing" as one would understand it in the commercial world.
Stimpy walks up to acoustic singer songwriter playing in the pub
Education - "You need some drums on that track"
Marketing - "You need me to drum on that track, not that other bloke"
Advertising - "Stimpy. Drumming on hit records since 1974"
As someone
who's actually read the NHS branding guidelines (not cover-to-cover I may add), they're rather useful if you have to do things like ordering headed notepaper, painting the sides of vans or putting a sign on the front of your hospital.
The NHS needs marketing
The new government has slashed the marketing budgets of all departments massively. An example of the dangers of this policy was the surge in flu cases at the end of last year: without the annual flu awareness campaign, people weren't thinking about it as much and some poor people were dying from it. You can claim that a campaign wouldn't make a dfference, but the figures speak for themselves.
There are thousands of marketing campaigns that are absolutely essential, whether it's telling parents the truth about MMR (vital since the Wakefield fiasco), letting people know the first stages of a stroke or telling teachers about a new resource for lesson planning.
You're probably right that it's unloved, but to say it is unnecessary or not useful is just wrong.
No.
The budget needed slashing. And I'm no Tory. Or Liberal.
Flu' was worse because people at risk didn't go out because of the appalling weather. Prove otherwise. It might be down to marketing, but I don't think it was.
MMR scandal? The man who broke it was a journalist. It went to the media. It wasn't marketed. Plenty of people are still ignorant of the non-link between autism and MMR. Measles cases have risen recently, and this occured under labour, with lots of money wasted on marketing.
The first stages of a stroke advert? It's not marketing, it's public service broadcasting and that's not the same thing. Public information films are not marketing! They are there and people can take them or leave them.
Teachers getting information for a new resource? Doesn't happen. I've taught Biology, Psychology, Citizenship, PHSE, PSE, you name it, for the past 20 years in state schools and we've never had one single thing from the NHS, beyond vaccines in schools.
How do you imagine they
How do you imagine they tailor a 'public information film' so that it has maximum impact? In much the same way they tailor adverts for Natwest, Pot Noodle or BMW.
Without wishing to detail every beneficial marketing campaign out there - and there are many, not just from the NHS but other public sector organisations, charities and the like - pretty much every service provided by the state is marketed somehow. You can call it what you want - public service, putting up posters, providing content, yada yada yada - it's all marketing. And while I agree that lots of money is wasted on pointless campaigns, some are absolutely vital: for example, the MMR campaign is necessary because measles has risen as a direct result of the publicity surrounding Wakefield's 'findings'. The Daily Mail, and others, used the story, and the outrage they generated, to sell papers; this was also marketing.
I get your point: you think it's a waste of money and less vital than the services being marketed. And I understand why you think that. But these days claiming that public/charitable money shouldn't be used for marketing is as unrealistic as saying that the public sector and charities shouldn't spend money on IT.
Nah.
I think the public information films do what they always did - before and after the concept of 'marketing' was thought up - they present the facts, on adverts, on the telly, when most people are watching. How much does that cost?
MMR campaign? The fact that measles has increased its grasp, and the fact that this happened when NHS marketing had lots of money tells us exactly how useful it is. Marketing couldn't work out that such a story was going to put some people off MMR?!
I'll help NHS marketing, if you like. The horse has gone, mate. You can shut the stable door if you like, but it's gone.
You don't need to 'market' this information to new mums, because they get given the information when they go for their checkups, which are arranged at hospital. It's not hard to find these people, because they have 'registered the birth', as a legal requirement, they are, more often than not, in a 'Maternity Ward', with other mums and babies.
I'm very sorry, Monty, I appreciate you want marketing, but it's gong to have to be by burglary, I'm afraid.
People who are poorly go to the doctors or to hospital. There aren't enough beds. There aren't enough skilled workers. There isn't enough specialised equipment. People are dying. But you want to spend money on marketing.
Information is great. Information isn't the same as marketing. Marketing is unnecessary, particularly for organisations such as the NHS.
Oh, and IT is useful as well - appointments, saving paper, records of patients, communication.
Sorry, I don't mean to be personal, I keep saying it - Do what you like, but let's not pretend that marketing is some kind of life or death thing, because it just isn't.
Marketing
is a process which, if used effectively, will speed up the communication and understanding of a product or service. It doesn't have to be expensive, involve sponsoring sporting events, require celebrity faces or even appear as marketing. It is the raising of awareness about something. Its a catch all word rather like accountancy is a catch all word.
Now if the things it is raising awareness of are shit, then it is difficult to defend the marketing. If the matter is life or death, then it is worthy of defence. Bob Geldof did a hell of a job marketing the fund raising activities for Live Aid but most people wouldn't call it marketing.
I'm fighting a losing battle
So I'll end it here.
But I will say this: if you think an organisation like the NHS would be even a fraction as effective without marketing, then you are effectively arguing that the health service is only there to fix health problems and not to prevent them. It's not an uncommon sentiment, but the cost of dealing with all the smoking/alcohol/obesity related diseases, the STDs, the unvaccinated kids or whatever would massively outweigh any marketing budgets. Yes those things are already a massive problem, but if they can be tackled through a combination of education and policy (both of which will involve some aspects of marketing), then they will be significantly reduced; I suspect that if there wasn't already some sort of preventative programme already in existence the NHS would be swapmed already.
I'm not going to persuade you, though. I'm not actually a marketer (or 'marketeer' whatever that is) but I do work with them and I have seen the value of public sector marketing on numerous occasions. As for the video at the top of this thread; yes it's crass, it's ugly and above all highly irritating. It's worked though, hasn't it?
It does though, doesn't it?
Most people DO wait until they're ill before they go to the docs, don't they? It's not often ignorance of symptoms, it's fear of finding out for sure that something bad has got you.
For all the money that's been wasted on marketing by the NHS over the years, it's been a waste, because, as we see, it hasn't had the desired effect.
People have known smoking was unhealthy for years. Nobody markets it positively. All we see is misery, death, suffering and emotional blackmail about it.
And when did people mainly stop smoking? When they weren't allowed to do it in pubs.
And plenty of people still smoke. They all know why it's bad. Most of them want to stop, they all know they can go to the docs about it, there's posters on the walls of the surgery.
Bottom line? Marketing doesn't even work in matters of life and death. Nothing IS as good as word of mouth. Can't buy that. Marketing is about finding an audience and getting them to do something. Not killing people is marketed in most societies to most people. And yet, it happens every single day.
It's an extension of the nanny state, if you ask me. People can't possibly work out what they need for themselves, people had no idea what they want, they need people like me to tell them, don't they? No, it's a fundamentally bad idea. In my opinion.
Has the advert above worked? Well, I don't see how you can gauge that until the future gets here and we can see how marketing goes.
If the desired effect was to piss people off about 'marketing', yes, job done. ?!
I take issue with that
My employers actually provide best practice research to various functions in the Corporate World.
We actively differentiate between Marketing, Market Research, and Communications Professionals.
There is some overlap between the functions, but we see them as different.
It strikes me that what you allude to is the role of the Communications people, not Marketing. Marketing, in my head anyway, is supposed to help you differentiate products/services from their competitors, either on price, brand, quality, vlaue....whatever. Not sure that that's applicable to the NHS.
"NHS. Better than....well, ill health or death really"
So marketing helps the NHS to ensure that it isn't
"only there to fix health problems and not to prevent them"?
For goodness sake. The preventative function of the NHS is called education, not marketing. Health education, remember that? It's what the NHS did before it started wasting money on marketing.
I don't think the two are entirely seperate entities
It's a venn diagram with a great big overlap in the middle. It's the marketing people who design (not write) educational posters so that people notice them. It's the marketing department who choose where these messages are placed so that they're seen by the people they feel are most at risk. It's the marketing department who buy the time on TV so that stroke prevention ads are seen at the times when the audience they want to reach is most likely to be watching.
You're absolutely quite right that health education is a prime function of the NHS, but it's marketing that gets those messages to you. The overall result is education, but marketing shapes the conduit - in the end, it's marketing's job to ensure you're educated.
I dunno - it seems to me that people simply have different ideas of what marketing actually is, and that their arguments stem from that.
You seem to have confused 'marketing'
with education and publicity.
It's often the same thing
Is it not?
Someone else points out the nuances of various roles
that get conflated in this discussion, but I tend to think of marketing as the pseudo-science of brand identity, customer relationship management and the like. Beer & nappies, to quote the industry myth. It's about 'leveraging' your product and other such nonsense. It all makes money, so the bean counters like it, but it does so by treating customers (or patients) like so many cells in a spreadsheet, which I find morally dubious, if financially sound.
Anyone here ever
Had any interaction with any sort of client, customer or colleague with a view to a satisfactory outcome?
Been interviewed for a job?
Been on a date?
You're "in marketing"
Oh dear
String some buzz words together. Talk about lots of different things in 2 minutes so you can point to the 2 things that actually happened (a bit). Get some kids to say it (because they are the future).
If it wasn't such bollocks, It would make me cross.
Was that the audition tapes
for the remake of "Here come the Double Deckers" ?.Didn't think much of it Which one was supposed to play the Melvyn hayes character ?
Augmented Reality is the new reality
Reminds me of a friend of mine who is a little bit keen on PC gaming.
After a lengthy session on his machine he was sitting gazing into space and caught himself thinking: "Wow the graphics resolution on those office blocks is amazing."
A second later he realised he was looking out the window.
Little twats....
Who cares what they think, or the tiresome gits they're actually speaking for.
Aggressive
Its all so aggressive
The Prodigy in the background
'Ver Kids' saying what they demand, cos they own tomorrow and they better get what they want
No smiles
they do own tomorrow
we'll be dead
They can have it
When I've finished with it
Revival time for that old favourite:
I was showing a visitor around recently and he asked, "How many people work in Marketing?" I thought about it for a few moments and replied, "Nearly a quarter of them."
Reaction
The video has been damned on YouTube - negative comments are being deleted as fast as they're posted. The agency also have attempted some damage limitation here.
Don't shoot the creatives
It would be a mistake to assume that anyone involved at the sharp end of perpetrating that ad - the copywriter, art director or director - feels in any way proud of it. After all, some poor fucker had to be the one who got to design the Morris Marina.
This is a no-win brief. All that... I can't think of the right word exactly. "Guff", maybe? "Bollocks"? (Although the suit would probably gleefully call it "content".) Anyway, all that... whatever, and only 120 seconds to say it in. It happens a lot, and it happens to all of us - it's called a "bad day at work". So what do you do? You get lots of people to say it, splitting them up into lots of little boredom-countering chunks, preferably shot in close-up so that at least someone might actually listen and not be distracted by hundreds of explody, bouncy paint balls in Paris or whatever the de rigeur image is this month when your problem is the opposite: 120 seconds to fill and bugger all to say. As for the decision to use kids, that's not so difficult: their repeat fees are cheap.
I used to "be in advertising". And, as many of you know, I left the country.
Wow, colour me shocked
You guys really don't like marketing do you?
How do you find out about new records? How do decide what food to buy? How do you choose your car, your holiday, your hi-fi and all the other things you want/need? Is it all word of mouth? I doubt it.
This video is sending a message to people who do work in marketing and, you know what, like most people in most jobs, work hard while they are there. You are not the intended audience, it speaks clearly to marketing people.
It is a message to them to say that the audience they are marketing to is going to change over the next 10 years and is going to have very different expectations because of social media, the internet and the technology they are growing up with. Quite why this offends you is beyond me. Do you just hate kids reading scripts or something?
And yes, I do work in marketing and this is the first time the Massive have collectively offended me.
If you want to fight me about it, I will be at the Thames Valley Mingle on Friday.
Oh I forgot to say
It's a truly shit ad. But that doesn't excuse the disdain for whole profession.
I'm offended
because marketing gets taken so seriously, particularly by the people who work in it. I appreciate it's your living and I'm not knocking anyone feeding their kids, but let's not pretend that it really matters to anyone's lives.
It's not like being a fireman, or a nurse or a teacher, or a cleaner. Is it? Nobody's going to be any worse off if marketing died on its arse tomorrow. It's one organisation competing against another to sell more product, based on how well one can market, as opposed to how good one's product is, isn't it? It's about selling. Selling is less important than making.
It doesn't make anyone a bad person for doing it, I'm sure you're all dead nice. I'd just chuck you out of the hypothetical balloon first, that's all. And so would everybody else.
Good luck
Working for any company without sales and marketing.
No it's not as important as Fireman and nurses (duh). But apart from them, are you saying...
"Weeee, let's all make stuff and sit back. After all, nothing else matters right?
Y'know, cos like, every company that makes stuff doesn't need to tell people about it to be successful do they?
Nooooo, we can just keep everyone working and employed without advertising what we do at all."
-end dripping sarcasm.
Companies have a marketing department for a reason. Companies with bad marketing fail even with good products. SO yes it fucking matters or we'd all be unemployed.
You forgot to mention
that it's the tax from the profits that capitalist spivs make, the VAT from the things they sell, the profits from the shops that sell them, the income tax from all the people involved in grubby old amoral wheeel of commerce that pay for firemen and nurses.
And, of course,
Firemen and nurses don't pay any taxes, do they?
And the same wheel of commerce that
creates a climate for, for example, underage and binge drinking which costs us a bloody fortune to clean up after.
Oh that's just ridiculous
Not everyone engaged in commercial activity is selling alcopops to teenagers. The point I was making is that for a society to function, to be able to afford fireman and a health service and schools and a welfare state etc. it needs commerce.
Absolutely right
Just as not everything from commerce is lovely and wholesome either. The point I was making was merely the other side of the argument.
"Not everyone engaged in commercial activity
is selling alcopops to teenagers"
You should, there's a lot of money in that
*Looks at top of page*
Some bugger is trying to sell me MoreThanMusic by John Watts... for shame!
I don't work for the man, man
Out of principle. I wouldn't be unemployed, but you would. And if we all became unemployed, we'd all have to do things that were purely functional and necessary and nobody would bother inventing marketing.
The problem with your argument, and your sarcasm, is that you are quite right and the sarcasm is unnecessary.
If nobody marketed anything, yes, people would still find what they needed. How do you think anybody managed before?!
Firemen are being made redundant around my town. As are police, community workers, Coastguards, people like that.
They're not getting made redundant because everybody's forgotten what it is a fireman does and so nobody rings them up anymore. They're not getting made redundant because there's no crime, or because people have finally realised that water is dangerous because nobody marketed it to land-lubbers effectively. They're getting made redundant because some people are greedy.
They want more than their fair share and consequently, someone else has to have less than their fair share.
They're getting made redundant, these firemen, etc. Personally, I would rather they remained in employment and marketeers in the organisations lost their jobs instead.
If we've got a load of money spare and if there's nobody in hospitals anymore and we need some more patients - yes, let's spend money on marketing, but frankly, it's aluxury that we can't afford and anyway, if everybody did the same, nobody would be any worse off.
That's the bottom line, it's just not very important and the only people arguing that it is appear to be people whose livelihoods are tied up in it, which isn't terribly persuasive to me.
It matters to you, but it doesn't matter to me. There are people who do important jobs who need money more than you do, move aside, please.
You don't work for the man
Do you have a business card?
No.
I do not and never have.
Yeah!
Stick it to the man!
Sad fact time
Marketing works (in fact, as the saying goes 50% of marketing works - its just no one knows which 50%).
People are persuaded to notice things through marketing. If two equal factories set up selling equal products next to each other in a town, the one with a sign and an introductory price (i.e. a marketing strategy) would likely sell so many more products than its neighbour, that the neighbour would cease trading. Unless the neighbour noticed what was going on and did something about it. But that something would be called a marketing strategy.
You may not like it but it works.
But
Wouldn't it have been better if one of these hypothetical companies had realised that they were building a factory next to an identical factory making an identical product and thought - maybe we'd be better off going somewhere where they haven't got one already?
And that's the point. The people of our hypothetical town don't give a shit. If they're getting what they're after, they're happy. the only ones who give a shit are the factories, who would be better off finding somewhere more sensible to build their hypothetical mirror factory. Or, even better, make something we don't already have plenty of, how about that for an idea?
Great ideas
both of them. Ideas likely to be part of a marketing strategy - lets make a better product, make it where people want to buy it, look for a market that the competition hasn't exploited. That kind of research and planning is marketing. It's not just adverts.
And just to clarify my credentials, I work for the man but in a role that is basically all about sorting the wheat parts of marketing from the chaff parts. And there is more chaff. A lot more.
For every good idea, there is
an enormous pile of excrement it has escape from.
I personally work in Market Intelligence so my day job is figuring out where to direct our efforts. I often get frustrated with how irrelevant the end product is compared to the insight my team provided.
But I will defend the concept of marketing and the good people in it.
There's a flash of lightning..
and the cows look up. Fair enough, that's basically marketing's brief, isn't it? But I'm with Tim Tunes above on this : why does it have to be so aggressive/annoying/condescending/patronising?
Can't your good people treat us equally as good people?
You are right
The sarcasm was unnecessary and I apologise. I'm a little sensitive at the moment as I am in the middle of picking 3 out of 15 people to fire because someone has decided that what we do is not important enough to warrant the right amount of funding.
On the subject of is marketing valuable, I say yes. On the completely separate, unrelated subject of are front-line cuts bad, I say yes to that too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Private companies are not the same as public sector companies. What you talk about is absolutely right for the public sector. If I could take control of it, I would fire every middle manager and marketing person in the NHS, fire service, Police and local council and start again.
But the private sector is where the money comes from to fund public services, it's Joe Public's taxes, it's Bob Company's corporate taxes that pay for it. Whether you like it or not, marketing leads to successful companies generating billions of dollars for the country.
Oh and as for how we survived in the old days without marketing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising#History
Why would you
"fire every middle manager and marketing person in the NHS, fire service, Police and local council and start again".
Good question
Way off topic for a conversation about marketing, but from what I read and from the few people I have spoken to who have experience, there are a lot of people who don't add much value or worse, generate inefficiencies in the public sector.
I see it in the private sector too, when a company gets to a certain size, there evolves - and I use that word very deliberately - a self-sustaining sub-organisation that is there to justify it's own position.
The trouble is, it's almost impossible to tell who is adding value and who is a meeting-generating, paper-work-creating bag of wind.
Because of this I would remove all of the potentially redundant positions (not the people - the positions) and replace them with what is needed. In other words, lose the middle layer of flabbiness and rebuild a leaner organisation.
Of course this is entirely impossible to do in the real world for any number of reasons, not least the whole system collapses with that much change in one go. But the point is a real one, there is a lot of inefficiency in large companies (private and public) most of which is a result of a bunch of unnecessary folks generating work to justify their position.
Just to pull it slightly back on topic at the end, in the private sector, it happens that a lot of that flabbiness is in the marketing department.
"it's Bob Company's corporate taxes that pay for it"
Unless you're Barclays, Vodafone, .....
Bob Company is an SME, can't run and can't hide
MegaBob plc on the other hand...
I work in marketing
and it IS full of shitwizards and bollocks like this. Always talking about how we need to ENGAGE with CONSUMERS as if everyone is a giant hungry mouth that desperately wants to have a debate about sausages or whatever.
I am definitely embarrassed about the industry I work in and it's getting more embarrassing by the day. I work in a world where people think that the idea of putting little woolly hats on bottles of Innocent smoothies was a good idea. It's hard not to sink into a pit of nihilistic despair when such sentiments are expressed.
The sad truth is, this ad could have been made by any agency - it's a real 'there but for the grace of God' moment. This is how people in marketing talk now.
http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/
I'm not proud of how I make my living but it pays reasonably well and my family are comfortable as a result. I do my best to cut the bullshit and jargon out but I expect I am absolutely riddled with it.
There are lots of people in marketing who don't particularly like their jobs. Don't assume everyone who works in the industry thinks that they are doing anything worthwhile. I know I could/ should be doing something better, but for some reason I prefer to take the money, get on with the job whilst muttering darkly. The price being, when people ask me what I do, and I tell them, their first instinct is to think I'm an arsehole. When I'm on my death bed I'll probably wish I'd done something better with my weekday daytimes.
I work within the music end of things which is a bit better than doing Sunny D or something - and which, by the way, helps pay for Word, Mojo etc - but it's not exactly a noble profession. I've got vague plans to get a more worthwhile job one day, but life is what happens etc. etc.
You are so right
Marketing people are their own worst enemies, but the good guys really stand out.
Oh, and if you think you do a good job in your chosen profession, you have no need to apologise to anyone.
...and I, ahem, work in PR....
...and unlike Chimney, I *HAVE* done Sunny D, and currently represent a roster that includes (amongst other things) soft drinks, confectionery, branded pasties & sandwiches, washing powder, batteries, crisps and nappies...in fairness, we communicate to retailers, rather than direct to consumers.
There are a number of facts I hold to be self-evident:
1) 80% of what I say on a daily basis is utter nonsense
2) the remaining 20% isn't much better
3) Not all of it, is as bad as the video above, but I have tried to positively represent such work in the past (its not easy...)
4) I get to 'play' with words for a living - I like that. It's not Proust granted, but it's fun...
5) It pays pretty well and Mrs P hasn't had to work for 8 years
6) Prior to that she was a manager of a Care Home. She was paid less than me for a job that was INFINITELY more important, and I know that...
7) I don't make the rules, so why wouldn't I benefit my family by working in this way and finally - leading on my previous point...
8) I'll never lie on my deathbed and regret this job. It put food on the table, and clothes on the kids, and despite what some nay-sayers would have you believe, didn't hurt anyone...
*dons tin-helmet, retreats*
Certainly cause a kerfufull that add
and it certainly is an awful bloody add but it seems to have gotten people talking...
Here's a question, if Bill Hicks had never marketed his act then how would Dennis Leary have known where to get his material?
I don't understand the Utopia that is being proposed
that would not have marketing as a function of and for its social, economic and political structures and interactions.
By the way I belong to that other leech class - lawyers. So, sue me.
Could be worse
you could be a banker.............
it could be worse
I could be a lawyer who works for a bank. Oh wait a minute...
Those kids
Miserable fuckers aren't they? Don't the kids of today know how to have fun?
Blimey!
It's only marketing! Relax. And why is one job any more important than another? They're all valid in their own way, not least to the person doing them.
NO!
Marketing is BAYD. M'kay?
Bill Hicks
Anyone who has left full-time education and still thinks of Bill Hicks as some sort of sage needs to give their head a shake.
...
This is just fucking typical!
As a long serving the Word subscriber I was shocked and appalled by my lack of goat when re-subscribing, all I got was a frickin' CD of some Australation yodelling about blaady African ship wrecks. That's the last time I re-subscribe this year you mark my words, The (so-called) Word.
Goats!? You need to use dogs to sell magazines
I've already got
a goat. Her name's Emily.
Holy Crap!
I've been away today. I just thought it was a really crap and annoying ad...
DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED
I work at the sharp end of mental health - Crisis Intervention - and I can cheerfully promise you all that the activities of the Marketing Department at our gaff have not made one difference whatsover to what we do at the point of delivery.
Genuinely baffled
I've been sticking up for "marketing" on this this thread. I understand why PG Tips or Oxfam or Plymouth argyle or whatever need to "market" themselves: to project their brand and attract customers/donors.But I'm genuinely baffled as to why a Mental Health unit would have a marketing department. Who are they marketing to? Is it an internal thing whereby they're trying to attract more funding or whatever from the hospital/ Regional health Authority / government etc.? I Is it a public information thing as was discussed earlier in this thread re NHS? I'm not being facetious. I'm genuinely interested in why you have a Marketing Department at all and what it is they do.
Plymouth Argyle do NOT need marketing.
They need a fucking miracle.
Re Your Last Line:
Yep, so am I.
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about
If you have a product you want to sell, you have to market it, otherwise you will very quickly go out of business. Even if it's the label on a tin of beans, it's still marketing.
Some marketing campaigns are good and some are crap. This one is crap.
That's alright.
Private business can choose what they spend their own money on. If that's how they want to spend it, that's up to them. The label on a tin of beans might well be 'marketing', but it's also other things as well. If, magically, marketing had never existed in any form, would tins of beans still have labels on them? Yes they would because otherwise, how could you tell the difference between beans and spaghetti hoops?
Are cows different to pigs because of marketing? No inherently, no. Apples? Oranges? You CAN market these things, but the act of making one more appealing than the other is the point.
Marketing isn't as important as other jobs - as one marketeer has pointed out - which leads me to the idea that the public sector should not waste money on it - because they now have less money. The less important positions should be first to go at councils/NHS/Service providers. And the least important roles in the public sector are in marketing.
Hence the ridiculous Viz adverts of a while back -
"Been burgled? Call the police"
"Feeling poorly? Go to the Hospital"
It's stupid to waste money on marketing these services, when there is less they can do for you as a result of cutbacks.
Schools feel obliged to market themselves purely as a result of league tables.
Getting rid of school league tables - which are a total waste of time, money and effort for all concerned - would remove the need for schools to attract students from other areas.
Schools - for instance - are where they are. People who were concerned about education for their kids would try and move to a 'better' neighbourhood so their kids could go to the 'better' school. Basically, that's what happens in 99% of cases. Most kids go to the school nearest to them.
Get rid of the league tables, which show us nothing more than everyone already knew and you get rid of Mickey Mouse qualifications, money wasted on marketing and this money can be spent where its needed most.
Marketing in the public sector is a total waste of money. And the only people you have to ask to find this out are people who work in the public sector, who do the jobs that people don't mind paying tax for. What people DO object to is the wastage of money on Mickey Mouse activities - Advisors, Marketing Departments, Hospitality, etc.
I disagree
Marketing is in everything we do. Every product, every service, every job. I may not like some of the people that go into marketing, but what they do is important.
I suspect we're never going to agree on this one Buxton, so I'm off to buy that shiny new artist that's on the banner at the top of this page.
!
"Marketing is in everything we do. Every product, every service, every job."
Who collects your rubbish from your bins?
Has marketing enhanced your refuse collection experience?
I put it to you that it has not.
Marketing people in the public sector don't want to feel like they are a waste of resources and come out with tosh like "Marketing is in everything we do" in order to justify themselves.
You won't find many brain surgeons getting down on their knees and thanking the marketing department for their crucial role in saving and improving the quality of people's lives.
I've been a state school teacher for 20 years. Marketing comes into it - but only ever (so far) as an absolutely horrendous imposition. Mickey Mouse qualifications that are designed to be so easy that anyone could do it, and if they can't be bothered, the teacher can do it for them. This is what marketing has done for education - our qualifications are so easy, anyone can pass them - buy into our schemes.
The end result is a crumbling of educational standards in the name of one school trying to look better than another. In the name of competition and marketing. The kids suffer - the kids who pass the harder exams suffer, because it's hard for the layman to differentiate between two kids, one of whom has 6 GCSES from OCR and one who has 6 GCSES from AQA. And there is a world of difference. The marketing is for the benefit of the schools - at a cost to the students. It's immoral. It needs to stop.
By all means research the market and tailor your consumer durables to a supposed lifestyle that we're supposed to desire - but keep the fuck out of schools, hospitals and councils.
Marketing might have made itself ubiquitous (in some people's eyes), but it doesn't mean it's universally a good thing, does it?
There must be 20 posts from you railing against Marketing
Did a marketing executive run over your dog or steal your wife?
It infuriates me
I've never met anyone in Marketing. Not that I'm aware of. Like most people, I'm sure they're basically alright. All that irks me is the amount of time spent justifying why it's worthwhile. People who actually do worthwhile jobs don't tend to waste their time having to justify why their jobs are worthwhile.
The Emperor's New Clothes. What's that about? It's about marketing. No real good comes out of it.
It's ruined education. It's the embodiment of greed.
Someone said (unprompted) that they won't regret it on their deathbed - having been in marketing - wait and see what happens is what I suggest to you.
If you're happy having made product x sell more than product y, that's fantastic, isn't it? That's an achievement.
I know what you mean though, I'm going on a bit.
My last words on the subject (I promise) - Nobody would miss any of the work marketeers have ever done if it had never existed. Tough shit, it's the truth. Market this; If you want a worthwhile job, spend your time learning how to do something useful and don't waste your breath convincing people that some ephemeral task relating to sales that you do is worthwhile and meaningful, because it's not to anyone except you. Especially in the public sector.
Goodnight. Best wishes, think for yourselves - that's all I want people to do.
You would be great
at running a marketing campaign aimed at delivering the message that marketing is shit and doesn't work. But that would be slightly paradoxical.
And if I started a business tomorrow and didn't advertise or market myself (even through word of mouth) I would fail. Why would that be good?
Alright, this one...
Advertising's always going to happen, you have to make people aware that you exist. I don't mind that. I don't mind people thinking about the best way to do that. I don't mind them asking customers how they'd improve things. I don't mind companies wanting to reach the biggest audience.
What I do object to, I've outlined on numerous occasions and I'm not going to repeat myself forever. I'll summarise them though; It's not appropriate in all circumstances, the way that some go about it is immoral, most of it is so bleeding obvious that I think the self-congratulation is a bit presumptuous, and in some circumstances it is harmful to what is being marketed. Marketeers who remain ignorant of these subtleties and are of the opinion that they are engaged in some sort of universal truth that must be acknowledged are responsible for a great deal of damage to the fabric of society, in my opinion. I'm talking about sexualisation of children for adverts and I'm talking about money wasted in education and the NHS.
It's all very well in its place, but there is too much power in the hands of profit motivated organisations and I don't believe it's very healthy in general.
I really have finished now.
I agree
but the same can be said about all professions. Some good, some bad. Police, politicians, priests and marketing types. There are even some worthwhile musicians.
It was me...
...that said I wouldn't regret it, and I know I won't.
What I would regret would be being a bigoted, blinkered anger merchant with a negative tunnel vision obsession about a discipline about which you know little or nothing (by your own admission)
NOBODY suggests that it's saving lives, and if they do, they are foolish. Just as you are for thinking you are unaffected in *any* way by Marketing.
Woah!
I don't think I've said that I am unaffected by marketing.
In fact, if you do a little bit of research and consider the words I've written and the order in which I've placed them, you might be able to extract the meaning within.
And the meaning is - Marketing HAS affected my life. It has affected it in an unnecessary and unhelpful way. I've outlined why.
I think I understand the central vision of marketing very well. Having witnessed something as crucial as state education ruined as a result of it and discussing with various NHS professionals how much better the wasted money could have been spent.
I can see why your tone is aggressive and rude, you think that I'm being unpleasant about your death.
I am not, and would not do this.
What I am doing is suggesting that, contrary to your belief, you cannot predict the future. Plenty of people feed their families doing far more onerous and morally dubious jobs than those in marketing. Should anyone regret anything, if they're doing something as noble as feeding children? I'm not judging anybody, I'm not wishing death or an unpleasant death or anything like that. I'm saying, in the words of Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warne "Who knows what tomorrow brings?".
One of the recurring themes on this thread has been related to the arrogance of some people in marketing. Claiming to know the future might sound a bit arrogant, I think.
Calling me names is a bit rude, but from a chap who has clearly not read very much that I've written and thinks he can know how he'll feel in a totally novel situation - hopefully far in the future, regardless of your kneejerk, thoughtless reaction - who works in marketing, I'd expect little better.
It doesn't save lives, no. Bearing this in mind, perhaps you can justify why money is spent on it, in the NHS, that could go towards saving lives?
Or, in fairness, don't bother mate, I think you speak with forked tongue.
In fairness
maybe you should look at the boys in IT. Their ability at keeping lines of communication open with the real world is quite infuriating.
As far as I can see,
he's just replying to comments made by others in an ongoing debate...which I'm sure many people on here, including me and you, have also done to a greater or lesser degree over the years. He has demonstrated a strong and principled point of view, and surely has the right to support it.
Perhaps
not relevant as such to the anti- marketing lobby, but I remember eading a few years back that the amount personnel employed in admin with Aberdeen NHS then exceeded the amount who worked in the care sector of same. That cannot be right, surely.
Also at that time I owned a shop there. Now in common with all retail outlets, shop lifting and the reporting of such, was an almost daily occurence. Always ALWAYS a visit from the Police was followed up by a letter:
Dear Geacher53, We are sorry that you have been a victim of a crime. Should you need any support, counselling etc etc etc.
Why?
I agree with Buxton... cut down the Admin Staff (inc marketing) and give us more teachers, bobbies, road sweepers etc.
OK.. My turn..
Buxton asks..
"Who collects your rubbish from your bins?
Has marketing enhanced your refuse collection experience?
I put it to you that it has not."
Portsmouth Council collect my rubbish and recycleables. Or their subcontractors do.
Their agents regularly pop cards through the door for us to pin on our kitchen boards telling us about what to put out and when, particularly around public holidays.
These cards are brightly and simply designed. They are printed in a number of different languages.
They tell us things we need to know which mean that our rubbish is taken away and not left to moulder for days on the kerbside.
They help to ensure that rubbish collection is carried out in as efficient a manner as possible, thus reducing costs and inconvenience.
Those cards will be designed by people in marketing.
These cards
I hope you recycle them
At least
You'd know when they would get collected
Hannah's goat hasn't worked this time, so I'll add something...
I had a bit of a row a while ago with a former ad industry husband-of-a-pal about branding. His view was that branding touched everything; my view was that the concept of branding had been extended so far as to become almost meaningless. After all, if branding applies to everything, how can you then distinguish between brands and non brands? In the end, we agreed to differ, in the pub, after we got on to the single malt scotches (which i like to think i buy on the basis of taste given that branding in the premium whisky industry is among the most arrant bullshit in the history of the world ever) ...
The same problem applies to marketing though. I'm going to get on Buxton's nerves here by saying that marketing is important. Again, echoing something i posted above, i'd come back to the post about marketing careers advice services to students - setting up some process whereby the final year students actually *get it*, the penny drops and they pop in for a chat. This takes more than having a dusty office in some corner of an old uni building, with British Leyland leaflets from the 1970s. Some folk would call it being generically good at running careers advice in tertiary education - others would call it marketing the careers advice service effectively; it amounts to the same thing.
As with branding, I don't believe marketing is "everywhere" ... Take dating for example. Some male and female lifestyle magazines will have hints and tips for dating that i find essentially dishonest because they seem to involve you being something you're not. (This is the kind of mendacious definition of marketing that seems to have caused such a stramash above.) Conversely, if i was going out on a date i would have a shower, tidy up, wear the less worse clothes from the cupboard and try not to conduct a conversation with her boobs during the evening, talk exclusively about Craig Brown's appointment as Aberdeen manager or riff away about the apparent inconsistencies in Outcasts ("Hah, faster than light but no reliable atmospheric re-entry system, dear me...") Well, not unless she was a sci-fi geek from NE Scotland in which case i would have already proposed over the asparagus hollandaise starter. ("Mair pinot noir quine?" "Oh aye, bottle each, eh? It's affa fine.")
Quickly drawing things to a conclusion, there was a whole bunch of stuff that was retroactively defined as branding and marketing but only after modern branding and marketing were formulated as professions (especially in post industrial service industry capitalism, at a wild guess), so as Buxton notes, there are whole histories of things and stuff and processes that were toddling along perfectly happily before the B and M words were ever uttered in earnest. No one was particularly bothered by them at the time, but - as other posters above have said, even those within the industry - lots of modern-era marketing is terrible bullshit and that's the stick with which it's tarred. But not all of it.
Ah, Marseilles v Man Utd has started ... I'm off...
Just one tiny point of order...
The Massive's collective goat - who only makes an appearance when a heated debate breaks out on a thread - was actually Pencilsqueezer's brain-child. (brain-kid?).
Mr Squeezer obviously needs to work on his marketing skills. (The branding's already been done, with a hot iron).
ahhh, understood
pardon my misinterpretation
No worries!
I'm cakes, not goats ;-)
I thought it was
to alert people that a troll is nearby
The more you know you know you don't know shit
Oh and a plea for any Massive Mingle attendees Friday. Don't bring up the subject of marketing. Ta
i thought
it was about a thread getting out of hand, a way of saying, "Stop bleating on."
I hadn't ever thought of the troll angle.
Billy Goats Gruff and all that...
It's just a little mood-lightener when things seem to be getting a bit over the top. The goat comes out when something gets our goat. And I think we can safely say that people's goats have been got on both sides of this argument.
I just wanted to tip my hat to Pencilsqueezer for introducing him to the Massive in the first place.
And I can't believe I've just had a discussion about the definitive meaning of a stupid picture of a goat.
I do love this place.
See i overanalyse things
even when it comes to goats
Excellent summary.
The idea that "whole histories of things and stuff and processes ... were toddling along perfectly happily before the B and M words were ever uttered" is spot on.
Marketing's failure is, by this mis-appropriation, to have made itself look tawdry.
I just think marketing
and the people in it have become a bit over important. There is obviously a place for making people aware that you have something to sell or provide, it's gone on for years, a pub sign is marketing for example I'm sure there are better examples but that will do for now. The removal company I work for relies on marketing, if we don't tell people where we are and what we do then they will go somewhere else, it's important. However our marketing department has grown in complete disproportion to the rest of the company and the money and time spent on finding new ways to do it severely aggravates those of us that do the actual work of booking and completing successful moves. Our marketing people have endless meetings, work from home, brainstorm, re-brand anything possible in order to come up with something more clever than the obvious conclusion that we should make our clients aware that we do a good move for a fair price. Marketing is not the rocket science it's made out to be that's all and I think most of us just wish they would wind their necks in a bit, maybe we should let them know.
I run
my own business. I wear a lot of hats. One of them is marketing. If I don't do marketing clients won't find my company. If I have no clients I make no money.
I believe the products and services we offer are brilliant. Without marketing I can't share my enthusiasm for how brilliant I think our products and services are. Without marketing I can't help potential clients differentiate what we are offering from what our competitors are offering. Without marketing my business would fail.
I hope it's like this...
I once saw a children's entertainer in West Lothian ...
... doing an 'environmental thing' who wore a hat a bit like that one ... well it was a bowler and may have had a flower in it ... afterwards it was pointed out to me that the chap was called Malcolm Le Maistre and he used to be in the Incredible String Band; his hat didn't have 'marketing' written on it though
As a small
business owner I also have to juggle a lot of balls. It's not easy, you have to fill some pretty big shoes as well. It's like walking a tightrope some days.
But I do enjoy wearing the red nose.
Does your marketing hat
look like this?
Damn it.
I must have been mere seconds late.
I'm amazed
that just googling 'marketing hat' worked so well
I'm not really surprised
that two of us had the same idea to try it.
That's what happens when you try to do these things on your own.
You need some professionals on the job.
Lenny's Google Image Search And Word Blog Post Consultations can make YOUR blog post stand out!
We Can Help!
I suspect all your Google Image searches
would lead to something like this and need a NSFW disclaimer.
but she's not wearing a hat
...
Oooh..
You only put that there for me, didn't you Dr G?
Here's an alternate marketing hat
for those who hate marketing and all its works
I've got to say...
We've drifted a long way away from the subject here - a pretty foolish video. There's a real self righteous and judgmental tone creeping in to this and a few other threads.
One of the things that keeps this forum relatively genteel is a sort of prudishness that you accept and refine your language accordingly. You adopt a certain code of behaviour as if you were spending time with an elderly relative (!).
But I think a certain amount of double standards are at work here. Remember the furore when people were saying Phil Collins deserved to die? Now we're saying people in marketing deserve to die?? I don't care - I found both funny.
However, the amount of moralising that goes on - on this and many other topics, including, hilariously, the behaviour of rock stars, suggests that the massive is mainly comprised of pious mother theresa figures who never do Bad Things.
This might go down like a sack of shit but can we all stop galloping around on our high horses, judging people we don't really know and just get back to arguing about Oasis or something.
Oasis are shit!
I've never heard their records, seen them live or met one of them but...etc.
You're wrong
and you're a grotesquely ugly freak
I hate Oasis because
they're "profit-making"
If you're gonna have kids in ads...make it funny
Is this still going?
Buxton not had a stroke yet?
I'm interested to know why marketing makes him so very angry. I've never seen anything like it.
It's the arrogance
Marketing is everything.
No, it is not.
Is a surgeon repairing a child's face marketing? No.
Is teaching someone how to plant crops marketing? No.
Is your bin being collected marketing? No.
I realise that some of you people, especially those who work in marketing, disagree with me.
Telling people when the council is going to collect the bins is not marketing bin collection.
People already want their bins collecting and all they want to know is when the council are going to come and empty them.
This is not the same as marketing any more than a bus timetable is marketing buses. Or any more than making an appointment at the dentist. To go the whole hog, it is no more marketing than the weather forecast telling us what time the sun rises and sets. Day and night are not marketing.
Finding an audience for products, alright. Elements of advertising, alright. No, I don't count the bin collection notices as 'advertising', the clients have already paid for their collections in their council tax - nobody's finding any market base here.
The problem is that this glib, arrogant buzz phrase, "Everything is marketing" is inappropriate. It is also incorrect.
In education, there is competition among schools to get the highest proportion of kids through exams at high grades. Nothing wrong with that. Except the result has been for various examining bodies to 'market' increasingly easy, teacher led qualifications that, frankly, aren't worth the paper they're written on.
In the NHS, there aren't enough specialists to offer care that is needed to people who are banging on its doors.
Marketing has been a hindrance to both of these organisations, in terms of money wasted and people who have been on the receiving end of care/education that is not designed for their own benefit, but as a way of making the organisation look good - at some considerable personal cost - because it's in competition with other organisations.
This is why 'marketing' gets my goat. If you are happy working in what's been described as a well paid job that you openly admit, at least 80% of is a total waste of time, that's up to you. I'm not knocking you. However, if this same marketing is everything, it's doing pretty well to squeeze everything in the world into the 20% of the time that's not a total waste of time, isn't it?
Just stick to making money for people, if that's what you want to do, if that's how you want to spend your one precious life, you do that. No problem. No argument from me.
But when it comes to caring for old people, sick people and making sure that the majority of people's kids are getting qualifications that will benefit them, as opposed to making organisations look good
- why don't marketeers leave that to the people who spend nearer 100% of their working day not wasting their time by actually making a big fucking difference to real people's lives, who aren't motivated by profit and who don't need to waste a single moment justifying to anyone that what they do is worthwhile.
And don't tell me that it does no harm, because it does.
And telling people when it's going to rain isn't marketing rain - don't get carried away.
The reason you need to market is because everybody else markets. It's called lowest common denominator garbage. Take away marketing, people would still get their bins emptied, and probably cheaper than they do now.
You can't just call everything marketing and think it makes it important, because it's bollocks. More specifically, it's marketing bollocks, which as the crappy film above shows us, is currently papping itself.
You don't do anything important, please shut up about how great you are. We'd all manage just fine without marketing, thank you. We've done it before and we'll do it again.
That's all it is. ;)
"We've done it before"
When? Serious question - when was there a time when goods weren't marketed?
Come off it
200,000 years of human existence.
Less than 100,000- years of language.
Animals don't market anything. Animals don't possess language - by Hockett's criteria at least. Animals do everything else we do. Is, therefore, 'language' the same thing as 'marketing'? Of course it flipping isn't.
How do YOU think people managed to find berries without Nigel from marketing actioning an innovative breakthrough in mouth-berry interfacing?
I'm not convinced that Og the male pointing out to Ig the girl where some juicy roots are counts as marketing. You might, and good luck to you. But it's not. I don't want to give credence to what most people on here have described as a waste of time.
You're not getting that time back, you know?
Marketing is with us now, but like people buying recorded music, it won't be forever.
Depending on what you define as 'marketing', of course.
My definition, I suspect, is rather less broad than yours.
Vive la difference, I'm sure.
I was just curious about where you drew the line
Given that good old Guttenburg was printing off advertising flyers in the 15th century. It's not a relatively recent phenomenon. Unless, of course, you're using Neanderthal man as your starting point. Which you are.
And that's fair enough.
Oh, I appreciate
that in marketing, it's seen as fairly reasonable to write of 80% of the time as wastage - and the remaining 20% in some way manages to constitute 'everything', which is some going, I'll give you that!
But to write off 99.75% of humanoid existence on Earth in order to justify what appears to be a fairly flimsy concept seems a little bit presumptuous.
Which, again, sums up what it is that I find unpleasant about 'marketing'.
You're assuming
That everyone who works in marketing thinks they're doing an important job. Not so. Most people I know just do it. Just like when I cleaned tables in Burger King or did telesales or cleaned chicken carcasses out of crates. Most people don't have meaningful rewarding jobs.
You're also assuming that no-one who works in marketing does anything worthwhile in their spare time like volunteering or raising money for charity. This is not the case. Whether it's done to alleviate guilt doesn't matter. I drive a minibus for Scope which makes a "big fucking difference" for the people involved.
As I said, I'm not particularly proud of what I do but you need to stop generalising, dude.
I don't mean to.
and if I have, I apologise.
I'm irritated by the phrase "marketing is everything".
Driving a minibus for Scope does make a difference, of course it does. And good on you for it. However, would you describe driving a bus for Scope as 'marketing'? Because I wouldn't.
Cleaning tables in Burger King makes a difference. Not clearing up food wasrte leads to disease and death.
I think cleaners make a real difference. I think lollipop ladies make a real difference, I just don't think they are 'marketing'. Whether they are rewarding or not depends on how you view it and how well people treat you. In terms of financial compensation, no they're not, despite being more necessary than marketing. Which I believe is wrong.
Do they volunteer in their spare time? How should I know? However, if 80% of what happens is bullshit, maybe theses marketeers could spend 80% of this time that they waste, doing something better? I don't waste 80% of my time on bullshit. The bullshit I do have to waste my time on tends to be meaningless twaddle in order for the school to compete in the marketplace.
Saying "Marketing is everything" is about as big a generalisation as anyone could possibly make, if you ask me. You don't get more general than that, do you?
How about I stop generalising about marketeers and marketeers stop generalising about what they do? Is anyone going to put that one up a flagpole and see if anyone salutes it?
"Marketing is everything"
That's a phrase that's only been used by you on this page, in this comment. What other people are suggesting is that, for better or worse, everything involves marketing. The Scope van carries the Scope logo. That's marketing. The cleaner in McDonalds has the golden arches embroidered on the uniform. That's marketing. The lollypop lady wears high-visibility gear with the name of the local council on it. That's marketing.
Well, I do apologise once again
Because I thought I'd been told in no uncertain terms that 'The NHS NEEDS MARKETING'.
The NHS needs marketing like a lollipop lady needs a badge saying she works for the council on her coat or the Scope bus has a Scope logo on it.
Which is to say, it's got out of hand and some people would be happy - in a time when many frontline services are being cut right back - to get rid of the surgeons, the cleaners, the lollipop ladies and the bus drivers in order to retain a marketing department.
Which is stupid.
If marketing is in everything because everything's got a badge on it, then it costs too much money and it's not worth it. Because, and I'm sorry, big effing deal. Big. Deal.
Manchester City Council spent £60 million in one month on marketing and advertising. It's not worth it, mate. There's old people dying in pools of piss, there's children living in poverty and the council spends £60 million - in one month - on marketing and advertising.
Hands up who can think of a better way for Manchester City Council to spend £60 million pounds in one month?
That's the problem, okay, it's ubiquitous, if you fancy. But it's too expensive when lives are at stake. And apparently unembarrassed by situations such as this.
A marketing person, this morning.
The Fonz is in marketing?
Heeeeeeey!
Manchester Council
Could you let me know your source for the figure of £60 million being spent in one month on marketing? I ask because I have recently become involved in local politics, although not in Manchester, and that figure does seem high.
Thanks.
That's because they didn't spend £60 million; it was £100,000
The sixty million figure cited repeatedly in this thread actually corresponds to Manchester City Council's total payments for all the goods and services outsourced by all its departments - schools, bin-emptying, housing, meals on wheels, day centres...the works.
Only 0.16% of that total was actually "wasted" on advertising and marketing.
Even so, Buxton's quite right; the profligacy is outrageous: just think how many pools of piss they could have mopped up if they'd reallocated that 0.16%. It's simply shocking.
Details here.
Thanks for this
The only story I could find was the one in the link below, which says that Manchester's overall corporate communications budget is being cut by 28.9% or £1.8 million, which means that the current annual budget must be about £6 million. That presumably covers all costs, such as salaries.
http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/02/08/18409-manchester-council-to-cut...
Exactly
I thought something was more than a bit squiffy about that £60-million-in-a-month claim, so I checked. It turns out that the total marketing budget for the entire UK national government comes in at only £44 million a month.
I've seen stats and figures being dodgily quoted in online arguments before, but a six-hundredfold increase in the actual numbers involved surely sets a new benchmark.
"Have you seen the price of a coffee in Madrid? Nine hundred and sixty euros for a café con sodding leche! It's IMMORAL!"
At the risk of getting re-involved
Not one person on this thread who works in/near marketing is going on about how great they are. They have defended what they do against some pretty surly and unfair criticism; this is the only time anyone has been defensive about the subject. No one is under any illusions that their work is somehow more important than someone saving someone else's life; how could they think otherwise? But just because Drs and firemen or whoever do great, important jobs, why does that mean that everyone else gets downgraded?
As has been said, there is a great deal of nonsense spoken by a lot of people involved in marketing. I cannot and would not defend that - there are idiots in this profession, much as there are in any.
That said, pretty much all of the examples of marketing you've been presented with are good examples. Just because you don't categorise them as such doesn't make them any less so. Your basic argument has become: that's not marketing, what *I* say is marketing is marketing. If I said something similar about teaching you'd rightfully jump down my throat; perhaps you should grant these people a certain level of understanding of their business.
And frankly I'm baffled that you hate marketing yet are happy to publish your views on a website for a magazine - essentially a marketing tool to 'extend the brand' and 'engage and build a relationship with its audience*'. The Word: a magazine, a podcast, a way of life and a brand.
*Please note, these are not Word's phrases. Though they could be.
I respond. Again.
1. "Not one person on this thread who works in/near marketing is going on about how great they are. "
A - "Marketing is everything". How does that not imply that Marketing is the most inmportant thing in the world?
2. "But just because Drs and firemen or whoever do great, important jobs, why does that mean that everyone else gets downgraded?"
A - In times of financial crisis, yes it means exactly that. Doctors, firemen and the rest absolutely have to be employed. Marketeers do not. In the public sector.
3. "That said, pretty much all of the examples of marketing you've been presented with are good examples"
A - Or, to put it another way, "Marketing is still everything, because Marketeers say it is". See 1 & 2.
4. "If I said something similar about teaching you'd rightfully jump down my throat"
A - You couldn't. There are bad teachers and good ones. That has nothing to do with the concept of education being a good thing. Teaching is what teachers do, in front of classes, in schools. Other things are not teaching. They might be related to education, but it doesn't make them 'teaching'.
5. "And frankly I'm baffled that you hate marketing yet are happy to publish your views on a website for a magazine - essentially a marketing tool to 'extend the brand' and 'engage and build a relationship with its audience*'. The Word: a magazine, a podcast, a way of life and a brand."
A - Says you. I don't 'hate' marketing. I think it's ruined education and the NHS. I don't think much of a job in which 80% of it's a waste of time. I'm talking to people via the medium of the internet. You can call that 'marketing' if you fancy, but I don't. I come on here because I'm interested in what people think. You might think that's marketing. I don't.
6. "*Please note, these are not Word's phrases. Though they could be"
A - More arrogance. They're not Words phrases. They could be, yes. Lots of things 'could be' something, but it doesn't follow that they automatically are, does it?
Marketing, from what I can gather from the people who have been talking about it is something that appears to attach itself, parasitically to worthwhile things. This doesn't make it 'everything', this makes it something broad enough and vague enough in terms of job description to make it both ubiquitous AND meaningless.
Telling people when they'll collect their rubbish is no more marketing than a policeman arresting a criminal is marketing lawful behaviour.
It's a job, it's not like gassing Jews, but then again, there's not too much in the way of moral standards in marketing, is there?
It's a tool, like anything else. It's fine for some things, it will wreck other things that it's not suited for. That is my only problem with it.
It is not everything. It is not the answer to everything. It has wrecked good things. It has propagated bad things. Marketeers appear to want to claim it is the cornerstone of civilisation. And it's not, in comparison to.....Firemen, doctors, cleaners and so on (and on and on and on and on).
Is that not straightforward enough?
As far as I can tell, the phrase "Marketing Is Everything"
has been used only by you - three or four times - but by no-one else in this thread.
Consqeuently, it now seems like you're arguing with yourself.
I can't help but think
I've just read a lecture on communism.
Apologies if you think I'm being flip but life is not as binary as you seem to think it is. Even in the public sector. Actually, especially in the public sector.
Everything
I've mentioned, I've been told is marketing. I don't think it's any more of a stretch to put the two together. And the fact that you think what I'm saying bears the slightest resemblance to communism shows where some of your thinking gets you. Are you suggesting that the communist states didn't market themselves? Sovtec? Is this news to you?
I'm left wing, yes. But I'm not a black and white viewer. But you'd actually need to read what I've written to glean what I actually think. And you can't be bothered. And I don't blame you. I've been saying the same things constantly and almost none of you appear to be able to extract the information from it. Never mind, eh?
The public sector is badly run, of course it is. Most people think this, don't they? Because they want money spending on the people I'm talking about and they don't want money spending on the people you're talking about.
Tell you what though, next time you need medical attention and you have to wait for months to get it, why don't you go to the marketing department and get what you need there?
£60 million on marketing in one month. One council. Is that black and white enough for you? Councils don't need to market AT ALL. ?Unless they have millions spare, on which case, it's still a waste of time.
If that seems reasonable to you, in a city with people living in cardboard boxes and with pensioners struggling and dying in the cold - and they still are - I don't think there's anything much more we have to say to each other.
Let's stick to talking about records and things we agree aren't life threatening, eh?
My comment
was an attempt at humour (I have shamelessly nicked a Bob Mills line).
My point really was that you have an extreme view on a very wide subject. You keep trying to narrow the subject on the basis that someone may have made the comment that marketing is everything in the thread above. Most of the people who are disagreeing with your view are actually saying, that they disagree with your totalitarian view that all marketing is bad. It plainly isn't. I have had some very nice experiences due to marketing and also, I believe I have improved my chances of health through marketing. I don't think anyone has said in the thread that all marketing is good. That would be just as daft as saying all marketing is bad.
I do agree with you that some marketing spend by government and local authorities is a very bad use of public funds. But then some of the attempts to improve frontline services have been very bad uses of public funds as well.
Councils do need to market. It helps people (pensioners for example) understand what services they can get access to. But they don't need to market to the extent that they do (or at least mine doesn't).
And just because I don't see all marketing is bad, it doesn't mean I don't care about society, do things to put things back into society or think that homelessness and struggling pensioners are reasonable. You're putting words into my mouth just because I don't agree with you. Spreading a message to suit your argument, if you will. A bit like marketing does.
Marketing is a fact of life
You may not like it, but there it is.
I'd try and move on if I were you.
Agreed
Bloody awful video though, eh?
So is apathy
I will if you will.
And
relax.
Can I just say
Having a passionate argument like this on the internet is almost impossible these days. The fact that Godwin's Law has not kicked in and people with very different opinions can debate strongly without it getting (too) personal is bloody brilliant.
Massive, I salute you all.
It very nearly did up there
with a comparative reference to "gassing Jews", at which the goodwill I felt towards Buxton and his passionately expressed viewpoint was somewhat dissipated.
Same here.
A rather unpleasant, and unnecessary, reference.
I think I'm being unfairly maligned
When the comparison is that some people do more morally dubious jobs than marketing; for instance.... I think it's a bit rich that some people are taking offence at a reference to whom they've NOT been compared with, pointedly.
Plenty of people would compare marketeers unfavourably to certain groups of people. Would you prefer that?
If some people are that sensitive about how people view the job they do, perhaps they ought to find one that's viewed more favourably.
And I get called Hitler regularly, thanks. Making people do things they don't want to, you see. You want to try doing my job if you find this exchange unpleasant. Perhaps it's coloured me? Who knows?
Oh, for god's sake.
Do you have any idea how preachy, sanctimonious and tiresome you're being? WE GET IT. You think marketing's all kinds of awful. You have a HARD, HARD job, presumably dripping with social worth. We're all simply bursting with admiration.
Sigh.
Christ knows I can sometimes get a bit sanctimonious too - one of the reasons I took a week off the blog recently was because I was sick of the sound of my own internet voice - but seriously, have a look at the SCREEDS you've ejected on this relatively innocuous subject. A bit much, don't you think, given how many actually important things there are to worry about in the world?
Oh Bob
Welcome back. You have been missed. Just a point about your post though.
God doesn't exist.
*Runs. Quickly.*
Genuine little lol there.
Have an up, that man.
I do, to an extent.
Look, I'm not trying to be unpleasant to anyone. I've been called names and I've not responded. I've had sarcasm dripped on me, unbidden. And now it's, "Ooh, he nearly called someone Hitler" - but actually did the opposite.
I'm not looking for admiration and respect, obviously I get enough of that at work (nb. self-deprecating humour, not a tool utilised by the pro-marketing lobby as yet).
I've pointed out at great length that actually, I'm not in general, anti-marketing and explained why - ignored and repeated. I've pointed out specifically the areas in which I've personally experienced bad things coming from marketing, the effects of which have not been innocuous or unimportant - ignored and repeated. I've pointed out that I'm being ignored and accusations repeated - ignored and repeated. Which I find a bit irritating, yes.
I am also, however, a bit irritated with myself, in terms of how much time I've been spending going on and on about the same - as you rightly point out - relatively unimportant topic.
The reason I've been going on and on is because it looks to me like any salient points - to my mind - get conveniently ignored and daft slip ups that I make, being human and fallible, get focussed on sharply.
That's okay, I don't mind. But considering what I've had to put up with on this topic - and I'm far from innocent myself, I'm not the one moaning about what I've just started moaning about above. Although I have apologised on a number of occasions and also tried to clarify myself when I hadn't been as clear as I could have been.
I've been happy to leave it and make jokes about how I need marketing more in my life in other threads and agree with marketeers about vegetables.
I'll leave it, and anyone who wants to go on about what a sanctimonious pinko - and anti-marketing 'bigot' I am, that's groovy.
I can be a twat and, in fairness, at times on this thread, I have been. But I haven't been the only one and I sure as hell didn't cast the first stone, in terms of unpleasantness, yet I'm the only bugger with enough about him to admit it around here, aren't I? And, more pertinently, the only one being encouraged to do so.
I think it's a bit dubious, personally. I'll give it some thought, but I'm not terribly impressed.
So, now there's a "pro-marketing lobby"?
Are you trying to confirm
that subtle humour is wasted on drummers? ;)
Point of order
It was you who brought up the Nazi reference, which (a)as Hannah commented was completely unnecessary, and (b) devalues the whole thrust and nature of your argument, to which up to this juncture I had expressed my support and empathy. We get that you think marketing is worthless and immoral, and some of us apparently tend to agree; but introducing such an extreme example of evil just in order to present your anti-marketing stance as the voice of reason is plainly absurd and, in the relative context, abhorrent.
Yes,
I said they weren't like Nazis. Which is a fairly crucial distinction, I think.
I also said that old people are dying in pools of piss and children are dying because of neglect and that this can only get worse by cutting front line services' budgets. And this is after one council spent £60 million in one week on marketing, but I note nobody's particularly offended by that particular horror story, are they?
Hi Buxton
I'm not sure you understand how offensive your earlier, throwaway comment is.
You're making a glib reference to the Holocaust; the genocide of six million Jews. That's two-thirds of the then-population of European Jews that was wiped out.
As well as the Jews, other minorities were targeted for extermination. Millions of Romani people, Poles, homosexuals and people with disabilities were also murdered. The final death toll was calculated as over 11 million people.
Using a cheap line like that... I just find it gobsmacking. I'm sure it was intended to be a lighthearted remark, but the throwaway fashion in which you use the phrase "gassing Jews", as though it was something unimportant, made me feel really uncomfortable.
I know that this thread is something you feel very passionate about, but please, no more remarks like that.
I can't guarantee that, I'm afraid, Hannah.
I know all about the holocaust, thank you very much. I'm using it as an example of something truly awful, to contrast with the less truly awful 'marketing'. There's nothing throwaway about genocide in my mind. And I don't think its dreadful shadow should be forgotten either - nor do I think that it's reasonable to say things like "Marketing = Nazis" and I don't think I can be much clearer. I am not being glib.
Nor can I save a single murdered innocent from those years in the 1940s. But what about the elderly and the very young who are currently dying as a result of money being spent on marketing? That's happening now, Hannah and it looks to me very much like, "so long as I'm getting paid, I don't care what the wider social effects are".
Social workers are currently being made redundant. People are dying needlessly and not one single person on this thread has had a single sodding thing to say about that. Not one.
Personally, that makes me feel rather uncomfortable. Let's not forget the dead and the appalling regimes that did it to them, but nor should we forget about those people who desperately need help today and who now aren't going to get any because the money's gone to marketing. What about the (barely) living, Hannah? What about them? Nobody gives a shit about them, do they? Not here at any rate. That's what makes me feel uncomfortable.
Why particularly marketing?
What about the money wasted on layers of unneccessary NHS management, the endless management consultants and reorganisations; what about the billions of pounds in tax avoided by HMRC sweetheart deals; what about the billions of pounds thrown away in Blair's Wars?
Seems to me that, if you're looking for a whipping boy, there are plaenty out there wasting more more money than NHS marketing.
Correct
My wife works for the NHS. They seem to restructure her department thrice yearly at huge expense with no obvious benefit.
The main purpose of the public sector nowadays is not to serve the public, but to serve those who work in the public sector.
Because it's a marketing thread?
I'm not looking for a whipping boy, I'm looking to see what people here say they care about. And so far, 'caring for the elderly', 'looking after children born in abject poverty' and 'looking after the sick' appear to be lower down on most - no, actually, on single person's list who's contributed, than 'not offending people in marketing by suggesting the money could be better spent elsewhere - in the public sector'. It seems to be a sort of 'Save The Poor Bankers' appeal that some would have me take seriously. Unbelievably.
Nobody's said, "£60 million on marketing, when people are dying, that's insane". Nobody. I find that rather worrying. Plenty of people have said how mean it is to blame marketeers though. That's interesting, isn't it? I think is.
I agree with you entirely, stimpy. The things you say are certainly expensive follies that we could well do without. Let's do without those, too. However, nobody's so far come forward and said, "Most of what I do at work is nonsense and I get paid well for it and I work in NHS management consultancy/tax avoidance/the armed forces". The people I've been talking to seem to be in marketing and consequently, that's the topic we've been talking about.
Please, give it a rest now
It's become really, really, really boring and tedious and it's time to just let it drop.
Why don't you start a thread on religion or something?
Yeah, I'll give it a rest.
Sorry for boring you by repeatedly asking if anyone gives a shit about old people dying, neglected in their own piss and seeing if anyone's bothered by children dying weekly of neglect, needlessly, when a council spends £60 million on marketing, in the UK, in 2011.
I'm terribly, terribly sorry to have bored you with such tedious points - I should have realised that these are boring topics for you.
Old People Dying In Their Own Piss? TMFTL?
Weekly Neglected Dead Child? TMFTL?
Better?
Better?
TMFTL
(couldn't resist). We should all lighten up a little on this (and I think it's all and not just you).
It's Friday. I have a day off work and am about to go for a walk with the kids. Blessings being counted here.
You're now clearly
allowing your anger and frustration to skew any sense of rational perspective. You're accusing people of not reading your posts 'correctly'; If you bother to read across this and many other threads, you will know that there are plenty of people on here who work in the public sector or who are directly affected by public services. I am a social worker; we have a dentist, teachers, mental health workers and a full time carer to my knowledge. Nodoubt there are many others who are directly or indirectly involved in frontline services. Are you saying that we don't care, that you have a monopoly on compassion and righteous anger? Well, I'll tell you something, fella - you couldn't be more wrong. Your sentiments might be spot on, but your increasingly hysterical rejoinders and hectoring tone have seriously undermined any consensus you might otherwise have created.
Well
"Are you saying that we don't care, that you have a monopoly on compassion and righteous anger?"
I'm saying that if anyone does care, they're keeping pretty quiet about it, aren't they? And it's not like I haven't asked, is it?
I'm not angry, frankly. I'm a bit disappointed about a group of people I took to be pretty humanitarian who can be bothered to make weak jokes about nothing much, but can't apparently be bothered to confirm that the situation I've outlined doesn't sound right to them.
I can only go on what people tell me, can't I? I can neither predict the future, nor read anyone's mind.
If you think something in particular, why not tell me?
I think you're a hysteric frankly
How do you know who cares about what? You have no idea what's going on in people's lives. How dare you even purport to know how I think or tell that I don't care. Some people are not as heart on sleeve as you clearly are.
You don't help yourself because you're stillup there on your moral high ground and not actually listening to what everyone else has been saying but practically having a stroke about - of all things - marketing.
So everyone stopped listening because to be honest you've made a total fool of yourself with your nutty ranting.
Of course you do
"How do you know who cares about what? You have no idea what's going on in people's lives."
As I've said, I neither read minds, nor predict the future. The only things I know about people here are what they tell me.
People have got upset about marketing being disparaged, people have got upset about me saying that marketeers aren't like Hitler, but only I've got upset that nobody's said that they care about needless death in the elderly and the very young.
If you don't tell me what you care about, you can hardly get upset when I've asked you and you don't tell me, can you?
I have read thoroughly what others have written, but I'm still getting asked what job I do this morning and why I'm against ALL marketing.
I imagine that's pretty boring for you, isn't it?
Please
Just has no-one on this thread has said that "marketing is everyting", no-one has suggested for a moment that they don't care about needless death. It's just that people do not agree that marketing is responsible. There is a HUGE difference. Claiming to have thoroughly read peoples' posts when you then proceed to thoroughly misrepresent their feelings is why people are reacting negatively to your posts.
Deleted
Post
And yet
You keep coming back for more.
And yet
you don't? Yet I'm the one who needs to stop, despite you being the one that's bored with it? Magic.
Thanks
That was in response to Five-Centres's post. If it was a response to your post, it would've been indented.
Buxton, can I ask...
what do you do? Jobwise I mean.
But what would
Don Draper do..?
"If you don't like the conversation
change it" is what he'd say.
Shag It...
*That's* what he would do...
I was going to respond to the note from Buxton above who accused me of being agressive and negative in my tone, and then I read further down and saw that the whole thing was just being argued in circles and decided that I should just relax about it.
I was even going to make a snipey comment about why Buxton was SO het up about the whole thing, but even THAT would be counter-productive.
Buxton, fair play, you don't like it. I get that. I don't like beetroot. You might, but that's OK.
Anyway, the new Teddy Thompson LP, great first track, then tails off a bit, anyone else care to discuss...
I'm not listening to Teddy..
I don't listen to him on grounds of the marketing strategy he's utilised. (nb. sarcasm, I just can't be arsed with him. He's in the loft to me).
But I do like beetroot. Not the Cast album. I do have some standards, you know.
Now we agree on something
Beetroot is a god among veg. But does funny things to your poo.
I loathe beetroot
It's the devil's work.
I'm with Black Type.
But what does beetroot do to your jobbies? I thought it just made your wee a funny colour.
Beetroot poo
Firstly: why has someone upped Lenny's comment? What is there to approve of in a question about beetroot poo? Or are you upping it in recognition of beetroot wee? I am baffled.
Secondly: in answer to the question, it does a similar dye-job as it does to wee if you eat enough of it. I may have revealed too much.
Thirdly: may the Joy of Beetroot descend upon you, for 'tis verily a Good Thing. I recommend the beetroot risotto from the Cranks cookbook - the secret's in adding vodka instead of wine.
Fourthly: Marketing is Everything, especially beetroot.
Marketing Is Everything
TMFTL naturally.
First two are very engaging CDs...
then it all gets a bit samey, and I find that really disappointing....
...and two amazing Kershaw sessions as well - when is that boy going to get back to doing some music radio? (the current documentary being good)
Buxton
I'm with you all the way.
My name is Morrison and I'm a marketeer
I'm coming a little late to this but find all this sixth form spartism about marketeers being "morally dubious" just silly. I've worked in technology marketing for the best part of 20 years - big companies, small companies, start-ups - and by and large it's been pretty good. Sure you work with a range of wankers - tell me a job where you don't - but you also work with creative and bright people who want to help companies communicate to customers in the best way possible so they can be profitable and create jobs. Along the way, I've travelled a fair bit, built lifelong friendships and provided a reasonable standard of living for my wife and kids. Most of the people I work with do it for the same reason. And in terms of the "morally dubious" - I have no problems with NHS marketeers but I do with consultants who have misdiagnosed cancers for two people very close to me and nursing staff who were just plain shitty to an elderly relative who passed away recently. Oh and if marketing is such an issue - why bother reading the Word...the magazine is choc full of it - can't help but feel the agency who did the "Gambling is the new rock n'roll" feature in this month's issue must have had trebles all round when that appeared...and surely you must have noticed the "such and such has a new album out round about now" that appears under many of the articles. I think you'll find that it's called marketing - I mean where have all these beardy cheque shirt wearing miserablists appeared from...you're not telling me they're not "positioned" with "key messages" and "brand values" like any X Factor wannabe??
(Sigh)
"I've pointed out at great length that actually, I'm not in general, anti-marketing and explained why - ignored and repeated. I've pointed out specifically the areas in which I've personally experienced bad things coming from marketing, the effects of which have not been innocuous or unimportant - ignored and repeated. I've pointed out that I'm being ignored and accusations repeated - ignored and repeated. Which I find a bit irritating, yes."
You didn't do Apple's marketing did you?
If you did you'll get a medal from this site
Apple don't do marketing
their products just sell.
What about the ad with Mitchel and Web?
The "I'm a PC" one, not to mention the iPhone 4 ad playing on channel 4 right now?
iRony
I'm rarely too subtle but that may have been it.
No, it's me
Its late and I hit post before thinking
Trick is to hit edit
before some numpty replies to your post.
Ah but isn't that advertising rather than marketing?
;-)
I have a job in nhs.
I have a job in nhs. Frontline. Mental health nurse. I can honestly say at this moment in time I would happily swap it for a job in marketing- knitted hats for smoothies- bring it on.If i get it right, people would possibly be impressed or talk about advert/ song/ collectable medals etc, if I get it wrong, no-one's lives (except maybe mine for losing a 20million quid contract or whatever)would overly be affected.
My job at the moment, get it right and for the most part, get abused, get hit , get it wrong and mess up peoples lives (not neccesarily the person I'm meant to be helping.)
Also, I think it's a bit of a false argument to say- hey lets save x amount in marketing, it's not essential and all that money can go on nurses and doctors instantly. It's not as easy as that, training, 3 years minimum. Places for these extra people to work etc, will cost a lot more than money saved.
Marketing isnt essential, apart from growing and selling food, maybe clothes,building somewhere to live and some kind of doctor, what really is. Its just that the non essentials are what makes life really mostly enjoyable.
Ive had wine. I may be rambling so I apologise.
Hey kids in the advert
This is your future
still worried about the crap you'll be buying?
I like what you've done with the yellow there
Really makes it stand out. It's much better than some other signs of the impending apocalypse I've seen recently, they were so drab I've forgotten what plagues and pestilence they were promising.
Good job there, DFB, I know have good awareness of your brand.
Marketing is a Chartered Profession
I am a Chartered Marketer.
Gets coat...
You know what Buxton needs?
A marketer. To help with his message.
They'd certainly
shorten it. The man's a walking advertisement for the need for clear, crisp communication.
and possibly give him a nice "Marketing? No Thanks!" logo
he could put at the top of each posting.
I think you might have just...
...let yourself in for twenty-five paragraphs on why concision is a disgusting thing to aspire to In This Difficult Economic Climate With Ickle Kiddies Dying IN FILTH! IN FILTH! When All That Money Being Spent On Teaching People To Write Concisely Could Save Everyone's Old Mum From An Undignified Demise.
You just don't care, you beast.
Wrong place, sorry
Right message, wrong place
Marketing is everything.
If only
there was someone one could turn to for professional help with this sort of thing.
I hear
the NHS do it very well
I didn't know that
Where did you hear that?
Mark E. Ting
That's not my name - uh.
Can I just ask a practical question?
Are we gonna do Stonehenge tomorrow night?
Sod this
Anyone fancy a pint?
My name...
...would suggest that I do.
Or to put it another way
I'm ridiculously late to this thread.
I've been good recently and deliberately avoided any controversial threads. For my sins, I work in marketing (for a private company). Not a bad job but I'm not here to sing the praises of marketing.
I'd just like to point out that The Word is marketed to within an inch of its life, and nothing wrong with that in my opinion. It's a brilliant example of marketing through the power of its founders, as this article explains further.
Sounds very like Ellen and Hepworth to me. Like I say, nothing whatsoever wrong with that. They do it exceptionally well.
Good article... Makes perfect sense to me.
Think of every cult product out there, the products people evangelise about, they all have that charismatic founder/figurehead who, in reality, probably has little do with the day-to-day running of the organisation but who personifies the values, culture and public image of that company.
Off the T of my H, Apple, Dyson, Lotus Cars, Island Records, Factory Records... I'm sure there are loads more.
Bleeding Heart Buxton Blows His Top!
....but no, I was about to have a stroke. Bearing in mind that an NHS marketing person had earlier said how effective the Stroke advert on tv had been.
Let's see what some of the (generally pro-marketing) massive have learned from marketing the early signs of stroke
People having strokes? They get ‘angry’ on internet forums, don’t they? That’s the first sign, isn’t it? Bleeding heart left wing compassion for society’s neglected? It’s a stroke, nurse!
Oh, the irony, wouldn’t you say, Massive?
Full vomit, full of piss, vinegar and self-righteous indignation
My Perspective.
1. OP – If you work in marketing...
2. Some people said, marketing is a load of rubbish.
3. Some other people said, no, marketing is IN everything we do – from making friends, getting a job, having a business card via suggestions that we’re all in marketing because in everything we do, there’s marketing. I misread this as being ‘Everything is marketing’ – a mistake, which I would hope would be forgivable, particularly as I did say that I was fallible and that I did make mistakes, not being perfect. I also had quoted at me, pretty much everything, as an example of marketing. I’m not going to be too hard on myself for missing the distinction. I get the impression that the good stuff, people will take credit for, the bad, people will say – you can’t market that, nobody could. Seemingly..
4. Some people, including myself, suggested that, perhaps, the worst thing about marketing was how important people in marketing thought it was.
5. Some marketing people said that, it was pretty important because the economy would collapse which would mean 100% unemployment, some said, no, in comparison to essential services, marketing might not be terribly important. However, if someone’s offering them a load of money for doing a job that resulted in 80% of what they said was nonsense, why wouldn’t they take it? Because of this, they would never regret working in marketing – presumably no matter what happened or came to light, or how they might change as a person. I questioned this.
6. Responding to this question, I was called some names, most amusingly, ‘bigot’, because I thought marketing in the public sector was bad and I wouldn’t see the good in it. I don’t mind being a marketing bigot, I can live with that one. Even if I’m not one, because..
7. Here are some statements I made about my stance on marketing, trying to clarify – “ In case I'm not being very clear, fairly irritated by 'marketing', not so much as a concept, but by marketeers' insistence that what they do is more important than the things they market. “It doesn't make anyone a bad person for doing it, I'm sure you're all dead nice”. “By all means research the market and tailor your consumer durables to a supposed lifestyle that we're supposed to desire”, “It's a tool, like anything else. It's fine for some things, it will wreck other things that it's not suited for. That is my only problem with it.” I don’t think that’s a very good example of someone who is an “anti-marketing bigot”, myself.
8. I stated very clearly that what I was primarily opposed to was money spent on marketing by the public sector.
9. I quoted, in good faith, a figure of £60 million spent in one month by Manchester City Council. I go this completely wrong. It did sound like a ridiculous sum, but I just accepted it. Having looked for the article again, I find the only one quotes exactly what Archie mentioned – it was a breakdown of one month’s spend, of which, only £100,000 (I think) was spent on marketing and that this would not save any pensioners from ‘dying in their own piss’. It would pay for four social workers. I would hope that would save some lives, myself. Either way, the figure I quoted was not correct and I didn’t intend to deceive anyone, I just got it wrong. I’d already said I wasn’t infallible and I made mistakes, I do. Who doesn’t? Apart from everyone else in the ‘Massive’
10. I said that Marketing was a job, not like gassing Jews. The opposite of Godwin’s Law, I intended. It was even picked up on and commented on favourably – the lack of Godwin’s Law.
11. Some people didn’t like me mentioning the holocaust. They said I ‘nearly’ invoked Godwin. I can understand this, but I don’t agree with the perspective. Is ‘The Producers’ bad? Fawlty Towers? I don’t know if they are or not. I tend to think they’re not. But that’s me.
12. As people (who I think, need looking after) are dying in needless ways, I asked the question, “Does it seem reasonable that money is spent on marketing a council when the money could be spent on really essential services?”.
I received no response.
13. I was surprised when I received no response and said so. “Is nobody bothered?”
14. I was told to shut up about it. I was being tedious.
15. I was told that people who had previously demonstrated that they were quite prepared to clarify their stance on all manner of issues, minor and major, now felt that it was so obvious that they were against needless death in vulnerable old and young people that there was no need for them to answer the question.
16. Because I piggybacked the question about needless death to the concept of spending money on marketing being not right, was another reason why people did not answer.
17. Besides, people told me, there were plenty of other ways that councils wasted money, so why was I picking on marketing? I said it was because it was a thread about marketing.
18. By this point, the name calling was in full swing; Boring, sanctimonious, general piss taking about how I needed a marketeer to put my case forward, how I went on and on and on, some piss taking which included (ironically) the suggestion that if only I was more concise, old people and ‘ickle kiddies’ wouldn’t die in filth. Nobody seems to find that offensive towards, say, Baby ‘P’, do they? Funny that.
19. While the piss taking was going on there have been three separate points at which marketers on this thread have claimed to know the future, to one degree or another. An ability I lack, but have at least admitted to.
And that’s what I think happened.
All the way through the thread, I’ve apologised for perceived slights, I’ve admitted my own fallibility and I’ve not called anyone anything rude.
All the way through the thread, I made the same point over and over again. The point was that I was not totally against ‘marketing’- I was against the public sector having to make huge cuts to frontline services while marketing departments continue to exist. I was misrepresented about this continually. I pointed this out regularly, but it made no difference. People still said I was against it, I couldn’t think of any other way to stop being misrepresented, so I just kept saying what I’d always said about it. See (7).
As a result of repeating myself and trying to clarify what I thought was a pretty straightforward position, I got called names. Boring, tedious. Too right, I agree with you. Still, if you read what I wrote in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t be, eh? What else happened was that I was accused to being angry.
I swore a couple of times, to wake people up, mainly. Old people are dying... you know. But I didn’t swear AT anybody. To read any emotion into anyone’s written word is a difficult thing to avoid, I know that. That’s why I try not to do it. However, my behaviour was repeatedly described as ‘angry’, ‘frustrated’ – I was guilty of this one - someone asked if I had had a stroke yet. It was suggested that I thought I was “The voice of reason”, when I made no such claim, “hysteric”, “hysterical”, having a monopoly on compassion and righteous anger, “total fool”, I was guilty of “nutty ranting” Someone said “They’d NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT!” – Don’t forget, I was the one being hysterical at this point, just to clear that one up.
I made plenty of little jokes – predominantly at my own expense – to lighten the mood, most of which were not seen as such. But no, I was about to have a stroke. Bearing in mind that an NHS marketing person had earlier said how effective the Stroke advert on tv had been, I think there’s no better evidence that your marketing might not have worked, than this.
People having strokes? They get ‘angry’ on internet forums, don’t they? That’s the first sign, isn’t it? Bleeding heart left wing compassion for society’s neglected? It’s a stroke, nurse!
Oh, the irony, wouldn’t you say,Massive?
All of these are examples of people reading emotions into other people’s words. My words. This is misrepresentation. Whether it’s malicious misrepresentation, I don’t know, because I’m not reading things into mere words. It might be, it might not.
However, when I pointed out that I wasn’t actually feeling as they suggested I did, again this was ignored.
When it came to asking if it seemed reasonable for the public sector to spend a lot of money on marketing when ‘ickle kiddies’ were dying needlessly, this was, once again, ignored.
So, when I try to put it together, like this, as a sort of reflection and attempt to see if I can learn anything from my experiences, what do I think?
I think that the treatment I’ve received, whilst exceptionally mild in the big scheme of things, tells me some things. I’ve already mentioned getting some things wrong, I’ve already mentioned them, and being boring and tedious, so I won’t repeat myself – see, I’m trying. As usual.
Sometimes, you can write things and people will tell you that you sound so angry that they’ve never seen ANYTHING like it. Now, unlike Mick, I wasn’t raised in a cross-fire hurricane, but I’ve certainly witnessed people who look and sound really, really angry in the flesh and, to me, they don’t look or sound very much like I did.
Sometimes, you can say “Black” and, no matter how many times you say it to them, some people will say “You said ‘Green’”.
Sometimes, when you ask them a question, people won’t answer you. And when you ask them again, they still won’t tell you, but they will tell you that you’re a sanctimonious, tedious bore who thinks you’re the only one who cares about anything - perhaps I just wish I was in marketing, then I could read people’s minds and not have to bother asking anyone what they think, eh?
Three (3) instances of being ignored. Several – more than three - instances of asking why what I’m saying is being ignored. Many instances of me getting asking questions and me responding directly to them. Sometimes apologising, when I’ve got something wrong, or when I might have generalised, or when I might have upset someone.
Individually, I’m not going to read anything into it. When it happens as often – and , frankly, as obviously as this, I think – ‘This is how some people try to discredit you’.
Choosing to only discuss specifics that suit you, whilst ignoring those which do not suit you is, to put it another way, “Avoiding the question”.
When Michael Howard repeatedly avoided the question asked by Jeremy Paxman, it was Howard who was the villain. Paxman was seen as being good, because he didn’t let it go.
I’m not Jeremy Paxman, this isn’t Newsnight. Of course. However, nor is it the opposite of newsnight. I wasn’t grilling anyone, I just got - No. Response. At. All, except abuse for asking the question, of course. How could I ask such a thing?
To me, that’s unreasonable. I gave straight answers to straight questions, but I wasn’t treated with the same respect I gave to others. Nobody’s Hitler (still), but you’re not being nice and friendly, are you, some of you?
Perhaps it was because I came over as sanctimonious. I can see why this was the case and I can work on that – and I will be doing. However, there may be a couple of issues with this.
Sanctimony is yet another tool used to discredit people who want ‘worthy’ things to happen as a priority. Think of the terms of abuse directed at people who say things like, “We should look after the less fortunate” – “Do-gooder”. One who does good is now, “bad”. Look on thesaurus.com - synonyms also include;Altruist, bleeding heart, good Samaritan,humanitarian, philanthropist, volunteer.
That’s discrediting, isn’t it? People could shout “Altruistic bastard” at me, couldn’t they? How terrible. Look at that philanthropist – helping people – why doesn’t he fuck off?
These are the politics of the right shining through the cracks, I believe. I wouldn’t have thought it had there only been a couple of instances of classic right wing behaviour, but when they all get put together, it starts to look bad. To me, it even looks like politician behaviour. Right wing politician behaviour, and if that is the target audience for ‘The Word’ – and I didn’t realise it was – then I think that marketing is possibly missing a trick.
The justification for Jeremy Clarkson rang alarm bells to me. That some members of this forum choose to behave in a similar fashion doesn’t surprise me, bearing that in mind.
You might think me a humourless, sanctimonious bore – that’s allowed, isn’t it? I don’t mind. I think I’ve cracked a few jokes here and there, I think I’ve offered a different perspective on occasion. You might not, that’s okay. I don’t think Clarkson really makes many funnies, it’s not my thing.
To most people, this will be of no interest. To others, they will point to the length of it and criticise me on that basis. That’s okay. Others will take issue with my perspective of events, some might even agree to some elements of it.
However, I’ve decided, on balance, to take my custom elsewhere.
I’m still not angry, I’ve collected my thoughts and I don’t really want to spend my time having discussions with people who expect me to apologise for my behaviour, but wouldn’t dream of doing the same to me, people who behave like squirming politicians, people who are offended by non-comparisons to Nazis, but aren’t bothered at “Ickle Kiddies dying” – Truly horrible, by the way teacher Bob. Truly. Horrible - Imagine that one on the front of your local paper. Sarcasm doesn’t carry well in print sometimes, does it? At least you’re concise when you tell it like it is, aren’t you? I’m sure a statement like that will hold up out of context, won’t it? Funny how things go, eh? You could call me sanctimonious, but if I were you, I’d be asking myself, what would the papers being calling me? Or your boss. Or your students. Or their parents. Or the governors. You’re being a soft lad, Bob. You might want to watch that, or you’ll be looking for a way to market yourself as the real life teacher who laughs at dead children.
Still, no hard feelings, I had a look and it’s not for me, this ‘Word’ website. I don’t much like the way a group of people have got themselves into a position where they can ignore what a person says and repeatedly accuse them of saying the opposite. And when you try to tell them again what you actually think, you’re boring, because you’re going on about it. And when your questions get ignored and you ask why - you’re ranting, nuttily. And then the abuse starts.
I don’t know how or when this became acceptable and it’s of no consequence to me. What causes it? None of my business, but as you find my stance ugly, there’s not very much pretty that I can say about some of the ‘Massive’.
Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong and I’m misrepresenting some of you. Well, it’ll do some of you good to see what it’s like, won’t it? Don’t go on about it, though, that’s my advice.
A pity, but only a small one. I’m sure you can find some TMTFLs that you can take your mind off it all with. I’m sure you’ll be much happier now there’s one fewer person who might disagree with some of your worldviews, because let’s face it, they’re pretty fragile on the face of it, aren’t they?
Still, you don’t come here to question your values and thoughts, do you? That much is abundantly clear. You’re welcome to it.
My conscience is clear and calm. I won’t bother asking about you, for the reasons outlined above.
'Now Thats What I Call A Flounce' (tm)
Can we
not respond to this? The guy's obviously in distress. Leave him alone.
Agreed.
Thread over, I would hope. I have no wish to prolong anyone's hurt, and wouldn't have contributed if I'd imagined in a million years that my comments would be interpreted as above.
I hope, genuinely, that all concerned are OK.
Calm Down Dear
I'm closing this thread
As I don't think any useful purpose is being served by it being kept open.
Thanks to everyone who contributed.