I don’t mind a survey.

They can be a bit annoying though. I know it’s on purpose, but they’re forcing you into a corner with some choices and then they are used as evidence to suggest choices that aren’t made are suggestive as not important.

The below question is from a survey I did as a customer of the Co-operative Bank. Because there are only five options you can’t display you care about all of them. Perhaps this is part of the Co-ops move away from ethical practice.

Let’s say you are morally opposed to bad things. OK, we’ve got rid of some people already. But the rest of you, if you want to suggest equality is important then you’re already looking at not being able to support human rights, being against oppressive regimes and manufacturing weapons used to violate human rights.

And if you did stand by supporting equality, being against businesses that support oppressive regimes and those who manufacture weapons used in violating human rights than you can’t be against business that are support the manufacture of torture equipment AND promoting human rights AND being against illegal surveillance.

This kind of thing informs marketing people to say they are definitely right about things. “Yeah, people definitely want to be on fire – 100% of people said they want to be on fire in a recent survey. So here’s the advert for this new colour of bread – we just see some people on fire. What? The survey we asked people what they wanted to be and they had to select one of: dead, on fire and have no arms or just on fire. They all said option C.”

This becomes a trend. All adverts would start just having people on fire in them. People would actually start being happy to be on fire for a while. Then slowly people would start to get annoyed by being on fire. A being on fire backlash would start. Just in time those whizzes from marketing would have their new campaign: selling things is all about balancing whistles on cats. Fade to black.