011 - Marketing Meat, Milk, and Mayo

Marketing is powerful for both good and bad, fear is a great motivator, and Big Ag’s lobbyists should scare you more than the NRA’s. This reminds me of Hellman’s Mayo (Unilever) suing little Hampton Creek, maker of “Just Mayo”, a vegan alternative that saves tons of water and pollution per year by omitting eggs.

The Standard American Diet (SAD) leads to disease and rising healthcare costs. And contributes greatly to climate change. And we’re arguing over product names

Show notes:

Hellman's Mayo (Unilever) sued little Hampton Creek over their eggless mayo (Just Mayo) - 2014.

Then after all, Hellman's gave vegan mayo a go.

Big Ag (Big Agriculture) are the first or second most powerful lobbyists in Washington. The NRA is anathema to many when we talk about lobbying, but Big Ag is more impactful to our health and the environment than any other group. And even the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are Big Ag's bitch - here's more on that: Cowspiracy is a documentary worth watching.

Missouri has become the first state to regulate the word "meat," ruling that lab-grown "meats" and plant-based alternatives can't use the word. According to USA Today, producers can be fined for "misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry." The law was pushed by the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, which has argued that the term is confusing shoppers and harming ranchers. Just days before, the maker of Tofurky filed a lawsuit in the state seeking to block the regulation and allow the company to continue to use "meat nomenclature" like "sausage" and "hot dogs.” Via LinkedIn News 

If our planet is going to make it another hundred years, we can’t continue factory farming at this rate. It is flat out unsustainable.

For example:

  • The water required to produce a pound of beef = 32 showers.

  • A 1/4 pound of hamburger requires over 600 gallons of water to produce

  • 29% of the world’s water goes to animal production. 1 in 6 or 1.1 billion people go each day without access to clean drinking water.

  • You can save 50,033 gallons of water by giving up dairy = over 200,000 gallons of water per year by simply leaving meat and dairy off the menu!

We should be happy that people are eating alternative meats. Stop thinking of the marketplace as a finite pie where your brand has a little slice, a fyfedom around terms like “mayo,” and imagine a bigger pie.

Also, anyone think about Camille Preaker with this rule coming from Missouri? Pigs are smarter than dogs, you know. #WindGap

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010 - Future Flight Attendants and Captains of S&M

  • Sexist stickers for kids onboard TUI.
  • PR crisis fail - no main brand Twitter account to issue a statement.
  • What is the deal with gender roles today? It’s confusing to be expected to display assertive traits in the office and “feminine” traits at home. And why are so many young men not acting like men?
  • Chuck and Wendy Rhoades have a special power balance on Billions and domination/submission role play is a release more common than you may think.

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"ALEXA, PLAY MARKETING PODCAST." <--- THAT IS MY INVOCATION. #LandGrab.

007 - Three Random Ideas to Inspire Action

Three ideas to start your month with some thinking and hopefully some action:

  1. Why avoid the news (via @jasonfried on the Tim Ferriss Show).
  2. Nearly half of working age families in the U.S. have nothing saved for retirement. #yikes
  3. Billion dollar ideas that you could invent via @allison_pons.

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"Alexa, play marketing podcast." <--- That is my invocation. That is called a land grab.

006 - The Greatest Marketing Trick of the Twentieth Century

If you can help it, work on products that make the world a better place, not a worse place.

More than 2 in 3 U.S. adults were considered to be overweight or have obesity in 2014. As we became more concerned about obesity, consumers shied away from sugary soft drinks. Major beverage businesses were able to play on the habit of buying a beverage by bottling a nearly free commodity in plastic and printing a compelling label on it.

Popularity of bottled water:

The trick - bottled water is no healthier:

Marketing bottled water relies on convincing consumers that bottled water is a healthier alternative to soda, when in reality it is an alternative to tap water, and often times is actually worse for you. 

Bottled water suppliers are not held to the same standards and reporting requirements as tap water suppliers. (Which in the U.S. are not high in the first place.) A study conducted by the Environmental Working Group in 2008 identified 38 pollutants in 10 brands of bottled water, while 20% of the brands were indistinguishable from tap water.

Ironically, bottled water works against the goals of health and environmentally conscious consumers. Plastic from bottled water contributes to environmental degradation and Trash Islands (plural, as there are 5 oceanic floating trash heaps, some the size of Texas).

  • Buying a litre of bottled water costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than a litre of tap water

  • The average person produces half a pound of plastic waste every day. No wonder the oceans are filling up with waste!

Marketing:

But it’s not just marketed as having “no calories or artificial ingredients” - it’s marketed as healthier and safer than tap water. That's BS.

Racist advertising and targeting:

In 2014, Nestlé spent over $5 million advertising Pure Life — the most advertised U.S. bottled water brand — and three quarters ($3.8 million) went to Spanish-language TV advertising. The target audience was Latin-American immigrants, particularly mothers.

The angle: despite admitting that tap water is much cheaper and usually safer, corporations like Nestlé market bottled water as part of the immigrant “heritage” of coming from places with less access to clean drinking water. 

This whole thing is problematic. It is bad for the planet. It’s a waste of money from consumers who are being manipulated.

I try to work on products I feel good about. Look at some of the brands I've worked with. Imagine if all marketers did so.

GET MORE MARKETING GOODIES:

Subscribe to the Beetle Moment Marketing Podcast on Stitcher

On your Amazon Echo device (or in the Amazon shopping app), add the Beetle Moment Podcast Skill then say:

"ALEXA, PLAY MARKETING PODCAST." <--- THAT IS MY INVOCATION. THAT IS CALLED A LAND GRAB.

005 - Productive People Don't Care About Texting

When it comes to texting, the always-on mentality is a problem. Drop your sense of entitlement and assumption that the recipient has their phone on hand 24/7. We need quiet without distractions in order to think. Your text is not that important.

Article that inspired this brief: The 7 Things You Need to Know to Text With Good Etiquette

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