Monday, July 04, 2011
Continued...
I came across another sort of marketing recently with an outfit called Hamell - market research not the one man punk rock band. See http://www.hamell-communications.co.uk/. I came across them in connection with a skin complaint and thought without thinking (as it were) that they might have been conducting research into the complaint in question. But, once again, I was quite wrong. They conduct research into how to move one's medicine from a prescription only status to a pharmacist status - which I think means that your pharmacist can give it to you off his own bat or if you ask for it but that it is not on open display - in a revenue maximising way. They are clearly a very go-ahead outfit as they also offer risk analysis. Not altogether clear what risks it is that they would be analysing but presumably they know. They have the Powerpoint.
Now I don't have any difficulty with having outfits which do this for a living. I was simply struck by their being a need. Could only happen in a rich, market-driven world.
I then move off to the chemist to buy some goo for the complaint, goo which I thought was called Dermal 500. I caused much confusion with both pharmacist and myself until I realised that the 500 bit of what I thought was the end of the name was actually the quantity, which happened to be printed underneath the name on the bottle.
Today I go back to the same chemist, confident that this time I have got it right. Quite wrong. This time the confusion arose because they have changed the shape of the bottle with the result that the box is now like a very large box of toothpaste rather than the box (not cylinder) for one of those round squat bottles of whisky. But we get there in the end.
Houellebecq runs on about a similar thing in his Goncourt prize book. You just get really attached to the design of your Rolex (or whatever) and then they go and change it just before you need to buy a new one. The design you know and like has vanished from the face of the earth - unless, that is, you like to browse the car booters.
# posted by Jim @ 1:46 AM 
