You may know that I do surveys for cash? They’re a little bit more involved than ticking boxes and getting money by return, but generally speaking they’re interesting. The topics range far and wide, which is enjoyable. The downside is that some of the surveys are very badly constructed whilst others set rules that are so close to the ‘meaningless’ zone that one wonders what the point of them really is.<\/p>\n
Today’s survey contains the following question:<\/p>\n
Thinking only about the PAST TWO WEEKS or so, have you heard anything POSITIVE \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it could be in the news media, or through advertising, or word-of-mouth among friends or family \u00e2\u20ac\u201c about any of the sports brands below? Please click on ALL those about which you have heard something negative. <\/em><\/p>\n Well yes, OK. I’ll think about the massive list of brands they’ve given me to look over and yes, I’ll make the appropriate entries. But hang on just a moment. Let’s look at the framing of the question. The surveyor wants me to indicate if I’ve heard anything POSITIVE about these brands? Yep, fine. Got that.<\/p>\n But then the surveyor goes on to say about this positive message that … ‘it could be… through advertising…’<\/p>\n What?<\/p>\n Am I alone in thinking that advertising is a biased message and is therefore not a message of positive values?<\/p>\n I mean, if you heard or saw an advert that said ‘Drink Cillit Bang, it’ll make your spots disappear. Bang and the spots are gone’, is that really – I mean really<\/em> – a positive message? Or is it a message from the product manufacturer and therefore biased to hell and back? And therefore (again), because of its biased nature, not really to be taken at the same value as a real<\/em> positive message?<\/p>\n To me, in my simple little fact-based world, a positive message about a product would be if my Great Aunt Maud said to me ‘I drank fourteen pints of Cillit Bang last week and do you know what? My spots have cleared up completely!’<\/p>\n That, in my world, would be a positive message. But an advertiser trying to get me to buy a product? No, that’s not; all that is, is an argument put in front of a potential consumer in order to try to get the consumer to buy their product instead of a product manufactured by their competitors.<\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may know that I do surveys for cash? They’re a little bit more involved than ticking boxes and getting money by return, but generally<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}