Can you let someone die?

I live about 10 blocks away from a big city hospital, which is very close to the 101 South freeway.

There are a number of severe accidents that happen in a radius of several miles from that hospital, and, historically, an ambulance who gets to the scene typically doesn’t have enough time to get the victim to the hospital in time, thus the victim dies in transit.

Enter MEDEVAC, a helicopter outfit that wanted to build a helipad at the aforementioned hospital to transport those future 101 crash victims.

While the idea above may make logical sense, the community surrounding the hospital thought otherwise. They got together and started a petition to block the building of the landing field. Their reason?

The chopper is loud. And the hours when this chopper would be most in use would be between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. (the time when most people are getting out of bars). If you already have a hard time getting to sleep, the last thing you want is a military-grade helicopter flying over your house at all hours of the morning.

And, if the chopper landing field does get approved, then people may fear for their property values… Who wants to buy a house that’s in the middle of a MEDEVAC landing strip.

Long story short, the community did successfully block the new heliport… I honestly didn’t vote for it, because the affected blocks weren’t in my direct neighborhood.

But, still, it had me thinking… The people who voted against the heliport are now going to make the chopper fly miles out of the way to a hospital that already has a helicoper landing strip in place.

This makes me think, “What is to become of the person who now dies in flight because they couldn’t get to the closer hospital?”

Does that make everyone in the community who voted against the above heliport responsible for that person’s death? And, if so, could the surviving vicims sue those who stopped the project?

Marketing 101

Hello class,

Today I thought we’d talk about a few of my favorite marketing ideas.

Car: Everyone loves the famous story about why Chevy had a hard time moving its Nova in Mexico… It’s because the company’s marketing department didn’t know that “no va” in Spanish means “doesn’t go.”

I just saw another auto marketing faux pas the other day that just about had me spitting coffee out of my nose. It was a huge sticker plastered on a Toyota truck’s wheel well. The sticker was attempting to help brand “Toyota’s Racing Development” division. Now those words alone wouldn’t typically cause one to do a double take, but where Toyota screwed up was in putting the acronym for the division in big bold letters under the division name.

Yes, TRD. Try sounding that one out and then wonder if the genius who came up with that was bitter because he didn’t get the raise he’d asked for. I think it would be even funnier if he was actually still with the company.

Hot Sauce: A few years ago, the president of a major hot sauce company went to his head of marketing and said, “We need to sell more hot sauce. I’m prepared to spend several million dollars on a comprehensive ad campaign to saturate our key markets. I don’t care what you need to do, just make it happen.”

Over the next few days, the head of marketing thought about what that campaign might look like and then came up with a brilliant idea. He told the head of manufacturing to make the little hole in the top of the bottle a little wider in diameter. Not a lot, just a millimeter or two.

Sure enough, over the next six months sales of hot sauce increased dramatically. Not because they had recruited any new users of the product, but because the users they did have were simply using more of the hot sauce than they were accustomed to. In the end the company ended up selling more product and they saved a few million dollars on an unnecessary ad campaign.

Paper Towels: You have to love the great mind who came up with the idea of changing the standard square perforated paper towel design to a longer rectangular shape. The message they used when they marketed the new towels was: “Bigger sheets for cleaning up those big spill!”

Of course what people at home don’t know is that most people aren’t regularly spilling tons of stuff to warrant the new, larger towel sheets. And because most normal people tend to tear paper products at the perforation, households around the world ended up now going through the roll twice as fast as they used to… And no one was the wiser.

Food products: When you’re eating a snack such as a candy bar or bag potato chips, do you ever look at the weight of the product you’re holding. Of course not! And marketers bank on that.

Recently there was a big increase in the cost of raw corn products around the world. This means it costs more for companies to make actual corn products, such as corn chips. But rather than raise the cost of a bag of corn chips to account for increased manufacturing costs, chip makers (depending on the size of the bag of chips) simply removed a certain percentage of chips from the bag. For a small bag, it might only be four or five chips.
They adjusted the weight on the outside of the bag to reflect the content change, but who’s really looking that closely at their bag of chips?

Where it gets nefarious is when the cost of corn drops again, more times than not, the company will put those missing chips back in the bag, adjust the weight again and then puts a big, fat label on the front of the bag that says, “Now 20% more!”

Food companies have been running this scheme for years. If every time Snickers really increased the size of their bar 20% over the size of the original and kept adding to that new size every time they advertised a 20% increase in size, Snicker bars would probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen pounds.