A recent IPSOS survey asked marketers 10 questions designed to determine their level of basic marketing knowledge. In Canada, of the 350 respondents, only 31 per cent achieved a passing grade of seven correct answers.

I would suggest many Canadian companies stay in business because their competitors’ marketing capabilities are even worse than their own.

This survey result was alarming because it speaks to the credibility of marketers and the ability to drive profitable revenue growth and customer value. If we don’t understand basic marketing concepts, how can we have the organizational trust from our colleagues that what we propose to spend and where we recommend spending it is actually in the company’s best interest?

My first Free Press article, nearly eight years ago, was titled: “Marketing is more than making it pretty.” While a bit tongue-in-cheek, I made the case marketing is much more than just creating advertisements and hosting parties.

If the Manitoba government is serious about improving access to primary care, there is one reform that should be at the very top of its to-do list.

Pharmacists Manitoba has renewed its call for the province to significantly expand pharmacists’ scope of practice, bringing the Manitoba closer to the standards that already exist across much of Canada. The organization is urging the government to approve a broader list of common ailments and services pharmacists are trained to assess and treat.

It’s difficult to think of a more obvious health-care reform that would deliver immediate benefits to patients while helping relieve pressure throughout the health-care system.

The numbers alone make the case.

In 1968, as one of four children and supported by a generous government tuition-reduction program, I followed my two elder brothers, who were away in their second and fourth years of university.

We rarely saw one another, but as the only girl and well-trained to serve, I was expected to keep tabs on their activities. I found myself expert at developing the “believable” narratives my parents wanted to hear and increasingly incredulous within my own newfound freedom. My brothers cavorted. I learned to cavort.

During that process, I did locate my first-year classes (sort of). Some were stocked with 500 to 600 students, baby boomers in a university setting ill-equipped for the boom, but boasting expansive grounds, rolling hills and sun-speckled walkways. The fall term sped by as a series of conundrums — assignments often misunderstand, professors remote and forbidding — experiences shared with young women bursting the seams of the residence we shared, women fussed further by the defining of the primary objective assigned to us: “marry well,” if possible, “marry up.”

When the first term break arrived, I made the long trek home in my brother’s second-hand vehicle, a castoff secured by sundry means, hardly roadworthy. We ripped along freeways, floor boards partially exposed, a passenger door wired shut, back window taped, regaling with epic tales of all-nighters and midterms put to bed.