in my recent experience even the most blue chip of blue chip companies can be as dishonest and underhand as your local burgling scrote.

HR exist purely to carry out the will of management.

All you can IMO is get the best deal you can and get out, and focus your energies on her pregnancy and your future…

tbh whilst my job situation is not ideal, I think what happened to me was one of the best things that ever has – opened my eyes and made me far more aware of the games that are played by allegedly respectable companies…

Hope all turns out ok

clearly you’ve not seen the photos I’ve seen.
It’s simply poor trailbuilding, ignoring everything that IMBA have learnt over the years and publish for free on t;internet
You can defend him if you want but anyone who knows the IMBA guidelines will tell you sticking a berm underneath a downslope which sheets with water when it rains, is just going to create a puddle on the trail and a berm which will saturate with water and fall apart.

The older natural trails get damp because they went in through natural use so of course they’re not sustainable.
But to deliberately/or through ignorance, build unsustainable trails is just stupid – he’s wasting his own effort and showing himself to have a pretty poor understanding of trail building…

The official trails are in an entirly diferent, lower leage! So at the end of the day Tattoo Dave I salute you,

for building trails which turn into an unrideable quagmire cos he doesn’t understand the basics of making sustainable trails? 😯

My grandad died on my 17th birthday right in front of my gran. Choked on his own fluid from his lungs. What an appalling experience to put her through. TBH I was always going to be an anti-smoker, I enjoy good health too much.
The fundamental issue with smoking I think is that we’re hard wired to consider only the short term.
Smoking brings short term pleasure. The main downside (disease and death) is years away.
You can argue about it killing you as much as you like but because that won’t happen for years, smokers won’t get it
IMO to eliminate smoking we need to focus on the fact it makes you stink, unattractive and other people think you’re an idiot.
And maybe an on the spot fine when you just dump your fag end on the ground without a passing glance..

This ‘Dave’ fellow certainly did not make Surrey Hills what it is today, he’s only been building for a few years.
Most of the trails are ex-deer tracks or were put in over the last 15 years by the likes of Bent Udder and the team who do the maintenance on BKB and YP – with full communication and co-operation with the landowners. Taking the mature approach, rather than the ‘i’ll do what I like’ approach which tends to antagonise people.

And I’m not sure this ‘Dave’ does build a good trail tbh. The run down to Walking Bottom has berms on the downslope. If you take a look at that after heavy rain, those berms are just full of massive puddles cos they effectively form a dam which catch the water coming off the hill…

I suspect he just has a problem with authority and likes to ‘do his own thing’ in a rather petulant manner. Better off getting some therapy rather than wrecking someone else’s land and winding up people who’ve been happily riding SH for years

Utterly short-sighted… thanks guys.
Surrey Hills is private land don’t forget. very easy to throw us off if we don’t show consideration..

[sucks teeth mode] ooohhh, that’s gonna cost you [/sucks teeth mode]

Mornington Crescent!

I have my talents. Which suit me for the job on my job description. But not the job I’m actually doing…

On the other hand I had an interview for a job this morning which could possibly be the most suitable job for me on this earth…

be interesting to see how this pans out.

so long as you wipe it down afterwards

Again, I dispute your estimate of marketing input.

Opinions are always valid…

Problem is, speaking as someone with 16 years experience, DS clearly understands marketing and is explaining just how the process works – and that’s it underpins everything a business does in relation to its customers. Basically, a business cannot have customers if it does not do marketing…

Worth taking a look here – the Chartered Institute of Marketing website and the pdf which defines the 7Ps of marketing.

CIM definition of marketing

The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.

If you read this thread without logging in (and without the ad filter, I presume), you get an ad for this website Tyre Shopper[/url]

Which is selling car tyres, on an MTB forum??

That’s how sophisticated marketing is folks, there’s no way that’s a coincidence, they must be tracking the words used in the thread and serving up what they think are appropriate ads. Genius 😉

I’m with TJ on this, What’s so surprising about ignoring/not being swayed by marketing. Some of us have a mind of our own. we are not all sheep!

Being able to think for yourself does not mean you are not influenced by marketing…

You need to understand that advertising/marketing communications are only a single component of what marketing actually is. There’s far more to it than what you consciously experience as a consumer.

If you’ve ever made a buying decision ever, in your life, then you have made that decision, in part, under the influence of marketing.

Marketing is made up of:
The product itself
The price
The way its promoted (branding, advertising, social media etc)
Where you buy it from

It also sells stuff to people based on their motivations and various human needs. People very frequently are not as aware of their motivations for buying stuff, as they think they are.

I have a mind of my own but I am still influenced by marketing. There’s no shame in that IMO…

double post

ok, for clarity then!
Ghandi – the Mahatma one in glasses and a robe and not much else
Dalai Lama – the Tibetan one who’s still alive and bothering the Chinese. Also wears a robe.

The point being, the levels of self-awareness of your own motivations and psychology required to be immune to marketing, are, IMO, heroic to the point of needing to be a saint…

Either way, after 16 years of being a marketing practitioner, I totally agree that a fair chunk of marketing is exaggeration, false, lazy, cheap manipulation etc and I despise it and those who create it for the sake of their own careers. Like RLJers, it gives the whole community a bad name.

But I will defend good marketing which is honest, helps people make choices about what to buy and keeps honest companies in business by helping them sell stuff. Not to mention charity marketing and tourism marketing and other less corporate forms… And I don’t like my profession being attacked by people who have no knowledge or experience of marketing and are coming at it from an ignorant/ideological point of view…essentially prejudice…

DS using brand names is one way (the easiest) of describing different products, you are barking up the wrong tree.

True.

But which part of the business is responsible for the brand?

I found them pretty patronising in 1995 when I was buying my first bike…
They lost my business in 2006 when they lied to me about my frame being sent back to Cannondale for warranty claim.
Thank goodness for Cycle Surgery having grown so much… at least we have some choice now.
Scaling up is no excuse for bad service. If CS can manage it, so can Evans. Respect/lack of for customers is a cultural thing, nothing to do with size of a company

Wouldn’t it be ironic if it transpired that the people who understood the influence of marketing and thus could work around it were least affected by it, and those who claimed immunity to it by denying it influenced their purchases was by extension the most affected?

Mainly correct IME.
The only way IMO to be immune to marketing is to have very high self-awareness, and total honesty about your motivations, weaknesses, need for status, belonging and the identity you wish to project about yourself.

Very difficult to achieve of course… possibly only Ghandi and the Dalai Lama come close!

However, I’m not sure that many people working in Marketing are self-aware enough to understand how marketing impacts on their own buying decisions.

IME those most vociferously ‘anti’ and insist they are immune are, by that very statement, lacking any of the required insight and self-awareness.

In fact, by refusing to study the principles of marketing, they remain ignorant to it and therefore less able to resist it. Best way IMO would be to study it, spend time with a few people in the industry, understand how it works, and then you will be more able to understand and avoid it…

I suspect the antis are driven by a fear of being manipulated. Which is fair enough, I hate people trying to manipulate me. But that fear won’t go away by denying its existence…

Crazy marketing skillz too.

Don Simon, as he doesn’t even know about the 4Ps and clearly knows nothing about marketing he’ll miss your point entirely…

That point being he’s volunteered as a brand advocate about a product he likes, which he prefers to other brands (and like HtS, has provided, of his own free will the company with free advertising and saved them some marketing budget…)

I used to live with a guy like this ‘marketing is manipulative, cynical and I want nothing to do with it etc’ and yet he was the most enthusastic advocate of Dyson vacuum cleaners I’ve ever met ‘amazing, brilliant, nothing else beats them etc’ I left him to it in the end…

I buy what I buy on the basis of need based on what something is

What a product is, is decided by the product development team. In most companies they will be part of the marketing department…

This forum IS marketing
Absolute poppycock!

This forum is social media
Social media is used for marketing purposes
Therefore this forum is marketing, no?

It’s part of STW’s marketing (part of their product)
It’s got advertising all over it from third parties
We discuss brands on here every day (recommendations, reviews, negative reviews etc)
Cotic use it all the time, CRC used to use it to deal with customer service issues, Superstar did a lot of damage to their reputation on this forum)

You do know that companies use sentiment tracking tools which record every mention of their brand on social media, and use that to understand what people think about their brands and products…

I know you guys will never accept that there are people like me to who brands, marketing and advertising are almost completely irrelevant.

This thread is not about marketing, it’s about TJ’s identity about being an outsider.

I have some blue disposables I bought. No idea of the brand.

So…
Assuming you like them and want to buy more, how will you know which ones to buy when they run out.
Or
Assuming you don’t want to buy them again cos they rip your face to shreds, how do you know which ones NOT to buy?

This forum IS marketing.

The marketing industry is actually rather scared of social media, it gives control to their customers, and away from them.

But the second we comment on a brand or product, good or bad, we are also part of the marketing process…

Do you not realise what intrinsic qualities mean? they are independent of marketing. washing up liquid remains washing up liquid no matter its marketing.

I know I shouldn’t bite but this thread is hugely entertaining 🙂

The liquid in a bottle with ‘Fairy’ on the outside is not the same as the liquid with ‘persil’ on the outside, is not the same as the liquid with ‘Ecover’ on the outside, is not the same as the bottle with ‘Sainsbury’ on the outside…

So who makes the decision in these companies about what the liquid is made up of and what qualities they want it to have?

convenience of location/timing

Where a grocery shop puts itself is a marketing decision, usually based on making it easy to reach by its customers. Why do you think corner shops are on corners? You wouldn’t put a grocery store that sells the kind of stuff people buy regularly and often impulsively somewhere that’s hard to get to, or you’d go bust!

Tesco Metro/Sainsbury Local. Did they just ‘happen’ as an act of God or did the supermarkets realise they had a load more revenue waiting for them if they designed smaller format stores, positioned right where people go on their way home? There’s a huge amount of data analysis of purchasing patterns and people’s journeys and market research going into the decisions around location, size, product range etc etc. This all comes from the product development teams…

Washing up liquid… well, where to start… it’s not a natural product is it, it’s created by its makers.
So who decides what chemicals to make it from, in what proportions, so that it can actually wash dishes?

The product development team. In the marketing dept…

Worth reading this: always worth remembering there’s more than one side to every story…

To give the DR their due I’m not sure their story is asking for dinner ladies’ heads. My interpretation here is some over-sensitive canteen staff got upset about a story and the Council over-reacted…

Daily Record current story[/url]

Background to the original story[/url]

I’m sure they are delighted that I now associate EDF with small orange turds.

Probably don’t care tbh, just counting the thousands you’ve saved them in paid-for advertising by starting this thread! 😉

What a product ‘is’ has been decided by a marketing department…

Someone in the new product development team probably. Likely to have used market research to understand what customers wanted from it, and whether or not they liked the final product, before it goes on sale.

‘Singletrack’ is a brand. Go and ask Mark and Chipps if you don’t believe me…

‘Scotland’ is a brand – I see plenty of ads for Scotland positioning it as a beautiful country with amazing landscape and rich heritage (which it is) – produced by the marketing team of the Scottish Tourist Board. The Welsh and English tourist boards do the same…

Advertising/marketing communications is not the same as Marketing. Marketing is the part of the business which focusses on customers’ needs and everything the business does that relates to meeting them: Product design, pricing, customer service, distribution strategy, PR, advertising.

Good marketing is great, it helps us make choices.
Bad marketing is cr&p – it justifies the cynics with their cynicism and gives all marketing a bad name. Personally I hate dishonest and manipulative marketing, like I hate anyone who’s dishonest and manipulative.

But not all marketing is dishonest and manipulative. A lot of it, maybe, but not all…

I love people who live in the UK (a capitalist society) who say they’re not affected by marketing…

So you’ve never bought anything ever in your life then, or given money to a charity, or voted? Or made a choice about anything you’ve paid for ever? I presume everything you own has been made from scratch by you…?

This post tells you how powerful the campaign is… even HtS, a marketing cynic I gather, has spent precious personal time giving their new thing a name – what in the business is called ‘engaging’ with the brand…

Either because it’s what the agency convinced EDF to take as the best idea, or there’s some research somewhere demonstrating that customers found EDF unfriendly and too corporate (or something similar) I would imagine.
It’s more friendly/accessible than nPower’s logo don’t you think?

Oh, and because it’s intrigued you enough to spend several seconds of your precious personal time posting it on this forum which a) means you’re more likely to think of EDF next time you’re thinking fuel bills and b) you’ve just given them several thousands of pounds worth of free advertising!

I struggle being interviewed by HR people who’ve never done my job – so how can they evaluate my answers and decide if I should go through to the next round…? I guess this is where questions like that come from… standardised, non job-specific questions.

Although when I;ve recruited in the past I would often ask some ‘standard’ questions like that simply to be able to make a like for like comparison across the various candidates. for e.g. some people answer that question as tho they have no weaknesses – which suggest arrogance or lack of self-awareness to me, and not someone I’d want to work with. Alternatively if they’ve clearly not prepared for such a predictable question, I wonder how much prep they’ve done and whether they really want the job…

So I agree, it’s a bit weak but prob has its uses

A brand can be given more weight by pure force of exposure rather than any intrinsic value, yes.

Frequently how it’s done…

Hovis, well-known brand of mass-produced factory bread.

Is it as tasty and healthy as the bread from your local baker?

Looks v promising to me.
Ericsson recently forecast that there would be about 50bn connected devices by 2020, rising from about 5bn in 2010. Li-fi will make this much easier
But is it secure?

After multiple years of interactions with advertisers and advertising sales representatives
at Yahoo!, we have noticed a distinct lack of knowledge about the quantitative effects of
advertising.

Nail on head

Luddite alert – I doubt these systems will make it into use in the real (litious) world

The full self-driving cars aren’t yet, but the Volvo system is on sale as we speak.

And I agree about the legal side of things, whose to blame if there’s a crash, whether due to a system failure or not? Be interesting to see how the lawyers at the car companies are approaching that one.

But which of the many marketing activities being undertaken at any one time are delivering the sales?

William Lever made the quote about advertising, “I know half my advertising isn’t working, I just don’t know which half.” [24]

Wikipedia

I would be interested if you can show me any rigorous data on this

TJ’s bang on with this. Effectiveness of marketing is far harder to measure than many people realise. It’s very subjective.
Internet is generally very easy to measure because you can track where people clicked after seeing the ad – did the ad lead to a sale or not, but almost every other form of marketing is impossible to prove 100% – too many uncontrollable variables. Press and direct mail come close but still not 100% – and it does depend whether it’s a brand campaign or direct selling…
In reality, whether a campaign worked or not is generally down to whether the ‘for’ camp are better at spinning the positives than the ‘against’ camp are at spinning the negatives. And political power in the team…

Not sure what the Youtube video adds by way of explanation tbh. It points out that driver responsibility still remains but if you get used to the car making up for your mistakes/poor judgement, your driving behaviour will inevitably change… and be less cautious surely…