Cochlear's marketing tactics, and aggressive business strategy has hit the news again.
Cochlear's CEO, Chris Roberts says:
... the company has 70 per cent global market share and the current Cochlear implants only cover 10 per cent of the available market.
Note the word of 'only' in that statement, and already sets the intentions of a business to expand. He goes on to expand on this, stating clinical need:
"There is a huge unmet clinical need out there and it's up to us to organise ourselves and just go out and capture it. It's there for the taking. We can help so many people and it's a tragedy that we're not (doing it)," Roberts says.
Is this really about clinical need, and does he really care about deafness at the end of the chain, or is this about business and marketing strategy? Why is it defined as clinical need, can the man even sign? His confusing business strategy, and ultimately profit, with medical need (why the medicalisation of us?) is outlined here:
"We've challenged everyone in the organisation. When we're doing a billion dollars of revenue, what will you in the finance department look like? What will the supply chain look like? We're not designing a supply chain for a business today, we're designing a supply chain for a billion-dollar revenue," he says.
The Australian. Also see an earlier paper on Pulling the Cochlear Industry Apart.
Which leads me onto a point I've made many times before, around voluntary organisations purporting to offer a philosophy of informed choice when it comes to distribution of information, such as NDCS. Since a group of scattered individuals cannot compete on the same level playing field as a multi million dollar industry, and do not have the funding streams for mass market campaigns, then how can information be balanced in the first place, if information being presented in the first place is not on a level playing field? There is also framework to consider here, how the medical field attracts a lot more funding than sign language does. Deaf culture and indentity attracts little money by comparison. What are organisations doing to put pressure on the industry about this? What about the acknowledgement that information cannot be balanced?
Comments (3)
im all for informed choice
what i dont understand is that with all the improvements madewith CI in the last 20 years...we are still looking at 4th grade reading level for most of them, right??
Posted by matt | March 9, 2007 9:27 PM
Hi Matt
You seem to be misinformed about CIs. Hearing loss before becoming lingual hinders development of language development and without language we can't think. You can't blame the CI for low reading levels it's to do with when the CI is implanted and this must be quite early to make sure the hearing nerve develops after birth or does not atrophy if deafness occurs later. BTW I am a Cochlear Implantee, I have a degree and know many many people who have implants and are highly literate.
Posted by Felicity Bleckly | May 17, 2007 7:18 AM
And I, like many other Deaf people have a degree and NO implant. Please do not imply CIs are the be-all and end-all in literacy for Deafies. That is simply not true! It is also rather insulting.
Posted by jen | May 17, 2007 11:17 PM