My friend Iain Murray, is – by far – the funniest commentator on marketing I know. I don’t know why he hasn’t been knighted. Too honest, I guess. He writes a column every week in Marketing Week which is the only thing worth reading in that rag.
(The rest is mostly sycophantic rubbish about nothing much. I just snorted on reading about a man one of whose chief achievements is that he helped to shepherd through a silly new logo for British Telecom to replace the silly old logo which replaced another silly but slightly duller logo, not one of which did anything to improve the phone service. What a wasted life – but I digress).
Anyhow, Iain often writes about the kind of witless pseudo-academic research which either tells you something you already knew or something you don’t need to know. I thought of him when yesterday I read that those twats who fail to run the National Health Service* are going to squander a few more million on research into finding what people want from their hospitals.
Well, this is a really tricky one, you useless berks**, but I can help.
1. People would like to have clean hospitals.
2. People would like to have their ailments treated promptly, especially if they have things like cancer. I would have liked it if someone had detected this in my late mother before it was too late.
3. People would like you to stop pissing away their money on bereavement counselling and channel the cash into something useful like medicine.
4. People would like fewer managers and more nurses and doctors.
5. People would like almost all of you who run things thrown out, blindfolded and sent to play in heavy traffic on a major motorway
6. People would prefer not to die on the way to the wrong hospital
7. People would like the entire government to spend a week locked in any of the many hospitals with MRSA problems.
Is that clear enough for you?
Just send the money I’ve saved you to my offices in Newman Street. I will then divide it up and send it to the nurses up and down the country as a Christmas bonus.
*Sorry about that to those readers who are not benefiting from our famous health service, as praised by uber-wanker Michael Moore. It is the largest employer in the world after the Indian Railways – but not nearly as well run and far more dangerous.
** Berks is English rhyming slang. To give you an example, apples = apples and pears = stairs. So, Berks = Berkeley hunt = work out for yourself what rhymes with hunt.
Oh how true this rings to my ears Drayton. I live in the U.S. and pay $800/Mo. for health insurance that doesn’t cover many of our expenses when we actually need medical treatment.
Everytime I receive a statement with a zero balance 14 months in a row, I become extremely irritated knowing how much printing, mail services and postage cost. I’m sure this little oversight adds up to a tidy 7-figure bill every year.
I wrote them a letter asking for half the savings for pointing that out.
So far…
No check!
Thanks for the great insights!
Derek Naylor