A debate on what the marketing & communications industry should do in an economy not based on consumption

I regularly wonder if the stance I have taken on Consumerism on this site is justified and constructive.  I’m not immune to doubt.  Then something like the UK riots comes along, and I decide that I definitely am. 

There is certainly a case for incremental work within the ‘creative’ industries to use our powers of persuasion to shift behaviour within the frame of Consumerism.  This work is useful and important, and I apologise if in the past I have suggested that is not the case.

But the simple fact is that it will not be enough.  It is all very well to start from where we are, but we have also to recognise where we need to get to.  Otherwise all we will actually achieve will be to further reinforce the frame with which we are tinkering, simply by the act of acceptance.

The riots in London and other UK cities are, in my mind and apparently in the minds of others (Zoe Williams in the Guardian for one) a wake-up call for our Consumer society.  Urban young men are the single most targeted audience group in the country for advertisers, for their power in defining cool if not always in spending.  These are the group who are told most often and most insistently that they are Consumers, that their primary means of participating in society is to consume.  The sheer persistence of commercial messaging in their lives is so pervasive to them as to be invisible, as is increasingly the case for all of us.  As such, what attitudes, behaviours and beliefs should we expect this to normalise?  Is it any wonder that those who are our ultimate Consumers, when they can’t afford to do it legally, do it illegally instead?  Why are we surprised that there is no apparent political motive behind their action?  These may well be the world’s first Consumer riots.

I do not wish to over-simplify.  I am well aware of the role of gangs in the violence, and the levels of orchestration.  But the timber has to be dry for a fire to start, and the people who were taking part in this activity were not all gang members.  And that’s before we go into the discussion of why gangs exist in the first place, arguably the drive for status that rules in Consumerist societies, and the resulting inevitability of the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor that comes from a zero-sum game society.

So what should we do?  Cameron’s proposals to date seem at best superficial, targeted at the symptoms not the causes, and though time should be granted, several of his ideas seriously risk doing more harm than good.  Take his reference to the planning system: he says current proposals to ‘free up’ UK planning applications through the introduction of a ‘default yes’ will mean shopkeepers will be more likely to be able to install shutters on their windows.  Superb.  That’ll solve it. 

No matter that the same proposals also reduce the difficulties involved in establishing new billboard advertising sites; or that they fundamentally threaten the green spaces in and around our cities which ever-growing swathes of research show are vital to social cohesion.  Like so many of us, good intentions notwithstanding, he is poisoning the roots of the very tree whose leaves he waters.

My starting point would be to draw some boundaries around advertising in society, a 180 degree cultural shift from the current world where applause goes to those continually finding new places to invade people’s lives and talk to them as Consumers.  Advertising may not be the only guilty party, but it is the most controllable.  We need to stop advertising to children, full stop.  We need to reverse the opening up of commercial television to product placement.  We need to find a way to police the internet effectively.  We need, fundamentally, to ensure we have some social oxygen to be something other than Consumers. 

Otherwise we will be here again sooner than we’d like to think.  And it’ll take more than a police surge to make it go away.

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On 4^th May this year, the National Trust launched MyFarm, a project to hand over the running of a real working farm to 10000 people through the web.  I’ve been working on it for them for 2 years, and it’s something I believe in very deeply.  I wanted to take the opportunity of Conservation Economy to think and write a little about where the idea came from and where I hope it might go.

The first seed of MyFarm (if you’ll forgive the pun) was sown in 2005, when I worked on the development of the Try Something New Today campaign for Sainsbury’s.  That campaign is best known in advertising circles for the mathematical calculation that lay at its heart – the insight that CEO Justin King’s £2.5bn incremental sales target could be reduced conceptually to putting £1.14 in every basket.  But we also identified the concept of ‘sleep-shopping’ – the idea that most people are asleep most of the time they spend in a supermarket.  We dramatized this by putting a man in a gorilla suit in a Sainsbury’s store.  No one noticed him.

This proved a great selling point for the Try Something New Today concept, which has in turn been a phenomenal success for Sainsbury’s.  But the response to that gorilla struck a deeper chord in me, one that has resounded louder and louder as I have learned more and more about the multiple challenges that face us, and as I have thought more and more about Consumerism.   To me, ‘sleep-shopping’ represents a fundamental challenge to the oxymoronic notion of sustainable consumerism.  The supermarket is simply too late to introduce sustainability into purchase decisions.

Indeed, in a nation where 30% of adults think oats grow on trees, sustainable food consumption is so far out of reach as to be invisible.  An expanding majority of us don’t even know what we’re eating, far less are able to hold a concern as to its provenance or production.  Only 8% of British mothers say they’re confident they can teach their own children about where food comes from.  As food supply challenges loom ever larger, our ability even to discuss them diminishes with the passing day. 

In this context (as in many others), talking to Consumers simply doesn’t cut it.

That’s where MyFarm comes in, in its own currently very small way.  MyFarm is an attempt to talk to people in a different way, to involve us in the process of production not tell us what to do at point of consumption.  It is an attempt to use a medium that is too often used as an escape from reality as a facilitator of connection with reality.  It is about People, not Consumers.  That’s where I believe the new creative challenge – and opportunity – truly lies, and that’s why I still think we need to be asking deeper questions than I think Peter Askew does in his nevertheless very inspiring and insightful piece elsewhere on this site. 

The potential of MyFarm is huge, though as with everything in this world, we have to start small. 

I hope that over the coming months and years we can have discussions about everything from food prices to agricultural subsidies, respecting people’s intelligence and opening the debate up.  I would love to see us expand the project so there is a farm in every region of the country that operates in this way.  I would love to imagine that in 10 years time we could have made a million people in the UK ‘Farmers’, and that when the great debates about food security really begin as I’m sure they will, those people will feel able to join in and take mature, considered perspectives. 

Most of all though, I hope MyFarm can be something that inspires other people with more creativity than me to come up with more, bigger and better ideas that talk to People not Consumers. 

I love and am very proud of the MyFarm idea for itself, but I will love and be proud of it far more if there is more to come.

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