I was just reading an interesting article on Mercola.com questioning the media/government hype of the swine flu -  Critical Alert: The Swine Flu Pandemic – Fact or Fiction?

It’s an interesting case study on how we perceive things and create our sense of reality. It doesn’t matter that the normal flu kills many more people but swine flu has been labelled a pandemic so it suddently creates far more fear in us.

Drug companies are particularly good at manufacturing fears and insecurities. While Mercola.com is run by a doctor who is clearly against vaccines, it does raise some concerns about how far marketing (especially with the aid of goverments) can go in misrepresenting the facts we need to make good decisions. In the case of flu vaccines, a friend of mine was only telling me this past week that she had visited a young man she knew in hospital struggling to survive after his body reacted badly to nothing more than a flu vaccine. I wonder had he known the risks whether he would now be fighting for his life.

In business, it is far too easy to just treat marketing as a game - where the goal is to sell as much as you can but with no real thought about what it is that you’re selling. I don’t think that pharmaceutical representatives who market drugs that are later found to have unacceptable risks are bad people. I just don’t think they stopped to think what they were selling.

Even if what you’re selling is not something likely to harm anybody any time soon, it’s worth just asking yourself, “What am I selling?” and then “How can I do better for my customer/client? How can I offer better value?”