{"id":226,"date":"2003-04-21T22:12:12","date_gmt":"2003-04-22T02:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/21\/for-earth-day-dont-panic-maybe\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T11:26:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T15:26:00","slug":"for-earth-day-dont-panic-maybe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/21\/for-earth-day-dont-panic-maybe\/","title":{"rendered":"For Earth Day: Don’t Panic (maybe)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> \u2019If you would care,’ said the girl with the strident voice, \u2018to examine the agenda sheet…\u2019 \u2018Agenda rock,\u2019 trilled the hairdresser happily. \u2018Thank you, I\u2019ve made that point,\u2019 muttered Ford. \u2018…you ….will …see …\u2019 continued the girl firmly, \u2018that we are having a report from the hairdressers\u2019 Fire Development Sub-Committee today.\u2019 (…) \u2018Alright,\u2019 said Ford, (…). \u2018What have you done? What are you going to do? What are your thoughts on fire development?\u2019 (….) \u2018Well, you\u2019re obviously being totally naive of course,\u2019 said the girl, \u2018When you\u2019ve been in marketing as long as I have you\u2019ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We\u2019ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.\u2019 The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford. \u2018Stick it up your nose,\u2019 he said. \u2018Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,\u2019 insisted the girl, \u2018Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?\u2019 (…) \u2018And the wheel,\u2019 said the Captain, \u2018What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.\u2019 \u2018Ah,\u2019 said the marketing girl, \u2018Well, we\u2019re having a little difficulty there.\u2019 \u2018Difficulty?\u2019 exclaimed Ford? \u2018Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It\u2019s the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!\u2019 The marketing girl soured on him with a look. \u2018Alright, Mr. Wiseguy,\u2019 she said, \u2018you\u2019re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.\u2019 — The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, from The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy series (circa December 1978) by Douglas Adams, chapter 32: Ford Prefect trying to talk sense with a group of B-Ark Golgafrinchams composed of telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and marketing folk, who have crashlanded into a prehistoric Earth and are starting civilization over from scratch. In their marketing, hairdressing sort of way. Fast-forward a quarter century to 2003: \u201cFar more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.\u201d – Hubertus Bigend, marketing exec at Blue Ant agency, speaking to Cayce Pollard, a cool-hunter, in William Gibson<\/a>\u2019s Pattern Recognition<\/a>, p.67. For Douglas Adams, marketing was still funny enough to make it the butt of his B-Ark population joke, and the carrier of the butt was a \u201cgirl\u201d about whose silly talk we could have a great laugh. Twenty-five years later, the seriousness of marketing is conveyed by Hubertus (\u201cHub\u201d) Bigend — possibly also a big-butted person, but resolutely male, eminently powerful, likely malevolent, and certainly deadly serious. Marketing really does threaten to crowd out everything else, a proposition I find rather frightening. Call it spin, call it PR, call it marketing: it would appear to be replacing whatever it was that in the past we called reality — consensus, dialogue, dissent, materiality, resistance, democracy. Examples abound. Take my BC Government, whose \u201cneo\u201d label precedes the word Liberal, but whose true colours are more closely matched by \u201cneo\u201d or \u201cnew\u201d movements all over the western world: neo-conservatives, new labour, neo-liberal. The \u201cneos\u201d have co-opted, colonized, and bought the rights to marketing: it\u2019s what they do best, because that way it\u2019s less apparent how badly they do other things, or how bad their other things are. It makes them look modern, of course, because it makes them look in tune with corporate market forces which seem to roll over our cultural and natural landscapes like so much force of nature, like so much \u201cit goes without saying,\u201d like so much inevitability. The BC Government, for example, is going to build a CAD$12 million \u201cdream home\u201d http:\/\/www.canada.com\/vancouver\/vancouversun\/story.asp?id=E6516E05-182B-4348-970F-754D4DC8CC18 community on the outskirts of Shanghai, to serve as a showcase for BC lumber. The government\u2019s hope is that it will entice the 700,000 Mainland Chinese families currently rich enough to build their own single family homes into building them with Canadian wood, abandoning their more traditional use of brick and cement (which incidentally are better suited to the damp climate). Obviously, there must also be thoughts of the remaining population’s eventual need to move into that consumer niche, so it’s a huge potential market. Let\u2019s see: according to the CIA World Factbook<\/a>, China\u2019s population in July 2002 was estimated to be at one billion two hundred eighty-four million three hundred three thousand seven hundred five people. Silly me, here I was worrying about a measly 280,562,489 American potential buyers of raw Canadian lumber, but Gordon Campbell, BC’s ever indefatigable neo-Liberal premier, hopes to have found about a billion more. What I find so disturbing is that the Premier and his team rely on marketing for economic vision & policy. He wants to “create a demand for wood-framed homes in China.” He acknowledges that the “Dream Home China program is a marketing plan and comes with no guarantees.” He claims that “eco-groups” opposed to current clear-cut logging practices are “targeting jobs” and are trying “to shrink the number of jobs in British Columbia.,” but the fact is that the BC logging industry has been in \u201csteep decline\u201d http:\/\/www.canada.com\/victoria\/timescolonist\/story.asp?id=2EB2FE5B-6002-48A1-8B6A-A5E06DAAB1B9 for the past decade and that over 13,000 jobs were lost along with 27 permanent mill closures in those years. The \u201ceco groups\u201d http:\/\/www.raincoast.org\/ are just trying to put the brakes on a new scheme that seems based on marketing, but not on sustainable economic and environmental policies. Too much of what\u2019s proposed by the government relies on creating demands that weren\u2019t there in the first place. This strategy has made some of us in the First World very rich in some ways, but is it sustainable, especially when these \u201cattacks\u201d http:\/\/www.coastweekly.com\/article.asp?section=1001&view=&ref=8964&status=cover on the environment are happening globally, typically under a \u201cneo\u201d banner? Unfortunately, no one is going to come along and put all the marketing people into a B-Ark programmed to crash-land on some remote planet, but maybe we should be thinking about how our focus on marketing is determining both our environment as well as our creativity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2019If you would care,’ said the girl with the strident voice, \u2018to examine the agenda sheet…\u2019 \u2018Agenda rock,\u2019 trilled the hairdresser happily. \u2018Thank you, I\u2019ve made that point,\u2019 muttered Ford. \u2018…you ….will …see …\u2019 continued the girl firmly, \u2018that we are having a report from the hairdressers\u2019 Fire Development Sub-Committee today.\u2019 (…) \u2018Alright,\u2019 said Ford, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}