F.A. Farm

I have seen an interesting confluence in the past few months. Lately, I have even heard sneering remarks about "market gardening" business models as well as being labeled "marginalized" and therefore irrelevant. [You would think that building a model that can feed people with only minimal amounts of fossil fuels would be a good thing - but nooooo.] Another aspect is running into several people who totally buy into the modern business model, with all its zero-sum and "selling ice to Eskimos" assumptions. Even the concept of cheap food, foisted upon us by Nixon's Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, has refused to die. The upshot is that some people expect market gardeners to magically compete with large-scale corporate agriculture, even though the corporate types are getting subsidies and the deck is stacked against the market gardeners. [Market gardener is a better term for what many small farmers are doing, especially those who depend on CSA share programs and/or farmers markets for their retail sales.] The marketing gurus never seem to get that I only need to sell to a small number of people, among other finer points.

You have heard these complaints before. BUT what I find to be new and interesting is the idea that modern marketers walk into a well-defined situation that is already set up for them. That is, the school system, the media, the legal system, the political system and all the rest of society is set up in a zero-sum game, where the money is always being flung into the air and the game is to touch as many dollars as you can while they float down to earth. Every once in awhile, the government turns a fan on and the dollar bills swirl up into the sky again. Some people have wisely invested in vacuum cleaners that suck up huge amounts of bills, while most of us try gamely to snatch as many as we can using our puny little hands.

So the marketer walks into this situation where the members of society are constantly being pressured and coerced to buy and the marketer just devises a newer way to divest them of their pitiful stash of dollars. Of course the marketing departments of large companies can generate sales! It would be hard not to. What amuses me is the simple-mindedness of people who think they are actually being creative by parroting the corporate playbook. A fatal assumption with this type of marketer is the assumption that a proven strategy is separate from its situation.

Let's take a page from anthropology for just a moment. One of the more fascinating aspects of shamanism is that it is intrinsic to place. Religion, on the other hand, supposedly works in all geographic locales. Thus you have a triad of desert religions that are imposed on native peoples in the Amazon, the Arctic, and other non-desert, non-Middle Eastern environments. It would be patently ludicrous if it weren't so tragic and constantly being imposed via M-16's and AK-47's. As with the religions, so with the marketers. People are trapped in a world they never made [Remember the old Howard the Duck cartoon? "Trapped in a world he never made!" - with apologies to Stan Lee. The comic book was way better than the crappy movie.] The marketer walks into an already defined situation where the corporations and governments have seized control of the marketplace. The marketer then comes up with a variation on what has already been done. At the end of the week he/she gets a paycheck and comes home to a nicely chilled gin fizz and reruns of "Law and Order" on their flat screen TV. You know what? I kind of like being "marginalized."