marketing scams

I just got a facebook friend request from some guy who suggests that we should be friends because we're "fellow Harvard alums" and therefore must have so much in common. Actually, he's just trying to sell me a book. His name is Keith Ferrazzi, and he has written a how-to-network book called "Never Eat Alone", which I would never dream of buying. This guy has built his whole career off of using people. His whole thing is that he builds "real relationships" rather than just contacts. But in the end, those relationships serve only to bolster his own self-serving needs and pocketbook. I read some reviews of his book on Amazon and apparently his book is filled with helpful hints like "throw a party and serve chips and salsa" and reads more like an address book, with Ferrazzi dropping the names of every person he's ever met. Some reviewers found it particularly disingenuous that he markets his "secrets" at the "everyman" when he himself benefited from his privileged upbringing and contacts at Yale and Harvard Business School.

Oh, so that's what I was supposed to be doing at Harvard? Networking, self-promoting, and making fake friends. Whoops! Somewhere along the line I forgot to do that!

A couple weeks ago I got a notice in the mail saying I had won a prize and just needed to call the number to claim it. I knew it was some sort of scam or marketing scheme from the beginning (I'm not dumb), but I thought what the hell, maybe I"ll just go along with it and see what it's all about. So that's how I found myself in a tiny "conference room" at the Hampton Inn in State College listening to a young lady give a sales pitch for a vacation timeshare scheme to me and two other Penn State students. It was actually pretty hilarious as that very morning I had delivered a guest lecture to my cultural geography class on my thesis research - which is a critical analysis of alternative tourism. And here I was being sold the quintessential mass tourism experience. The irony was thick. The young lady asked us where we'd like to go for our next vacations. One guy said Myrtle Beach. One said Florida. I said Vietnam. I think that threw her off a bit. Poor girl. I did feel sorry for her. Her job is to go around to dumpy college towns around Appalachia and the Southeast and try to lure debt-prone college kids into poor investments. That's gotta be tough.

morality and business

I saw an interesting presentation by Michael Conroy who studies the "certification revolution", or, as he explains it, a revolution that has the potential to make business and consumer practices more sustainable environmentally and socially while still working within the paradigm of capitalism. We're talking things like Fair Trade certification, which has grown exponentially in the last ten years to become a multi-billion dollar industry. The idea is that its a form of brand insurance. A company's brand - its image - now accounts for most of its market capitalization, but it is also highly vulnerable to fluctuation and changes in public opinion. He says that the trend is towards more and more certification that products are made in ways that are socially and environmentally responsible, and that having the certification to prove it will bolster brands. Of course, it all depends on consumers valuing that certificate (which in itself is a kind of "brand"), and being willing to spend a premium for it. But that definitely seems to be the trend these days, at least amongst those who can afford it (the inaccessibility of organic and socially responsible products and foods to the poor is another issue, and one that needs to be addressed) Anyway, it got me thinking...maybe this is a line of work I could go into. I could work for the Fair Trade organization, or something like it, doing the in-the-field assessments/inspections, at the farms and factories in developing countries, to determine whether they meet the standards for certification. That could be really interesting and rewarding work, and I think its something I'd be good at.

I've been reading a lot about the growth of the supermarket industries in India and China, where they're still very new but growing fast. Most people there still get their food from open air public markets, which I love and hope will retain their presence in the face of supermarkets. But with the rapidly growing middle class with its disposable income and discriminating tastes, the supermarkets are not going to go away; they will only expand. That's where I think there's going to be a huge potential market for some version of Whole Foods, or the natural /organic foods movement, in those countries. And if I could somehow position myself to get involved with the development of such a paradigm, ideally in conjunction with NGOs that have ties to farmers and farmers rights groups, and environmental groups, and fair trade people, and local food systems, I think that could be a career right there. I guess what I'm talking about is maintaining something like the traditional marketplace, with its reliance on local growers and farmers, but in a medium that is more palatable to the middle class, and for which its commitment to social and environmental values is part of its brand and market appeal.

If it surprises you to hear me talking in such capitalist terms when I've spent much of the last two years espousing anti-capitalist ideology, well, maybe thats because I've been doing some thinking and have come to realize that maybe the best (read: most realistic) way of challenging what I (and others) see as the problems of capitalism and promoting more humane values is not to try to tear down the capitalist system from the outside, because that's really not going to get us anywhere. With the ascendancy of the free market everywhere the only way is to attempt to shape it from within. And I guess I will now admit that there are indeed companies out there, and people in the business world, who are attempting to do just that. And while its easy to be cynical and condemn any scheme that talks about social change in the same breath as profit-making, I will admit that maybe the two are not as mutually exclusive as I once thought. I'm very conscious of what it means to sell out, and of the tension between idealism and pragmatism, and I don't want this line of thinking to seem like a cop-out. I've learned a lot in graduate school over the last couple years that's made me a more critical person, skeptical at all times of those with money and power, and of the systems that control our lives, namely governments and corporations. And I'm not giving up that skepticism. I think it will be a part of me always, that discriminating, questioning side of me, never taking anything at face-value, "deconstruction" the discourses, seeing behind the facades. And I don't want to a paint an overly-rosy picture of "responsible capitalism" because there's always going to be room for improvement. But I do think it IS possible for a company to do good, and to have an effective business model. The important thing is that the company has stated values and that these values trump the neoclassical axiom that the bottom line is all that matters.