Are We "Brand-Washed"?

From NPR books. The interesting bit of the article:

..."Whole Foods Marketing

Supermarket chain Whole Foods is known for its natural and organic products, and that's the image it is great at selling, Lindstrom says.

In Brandwashed, he describes how the company makes its produce more attractive by carefully arranging its stores and coming up with specific display techqniques. For example, he points out that when you enter many Whole Foods stores, employees are cutting fresh flowers.

"It is not a coincidence," he says. "What they are doing is to tell you on an unconscious level that, in fact, everything is fresh in this store."

If you pay attention as you walk into the produce department, Lindstrom says you will notice the boxes holding the apples and bananas seem to have been delivered by something called "Patty's Farm."

"The story is probably very different," Lindstrom says. " In the backside of the store, they're offloading all those bananas from huge plastic containers, most likely flown in the day before, into those individual-looking cardboard boxes, which by the way is not 'Patty's Farm.'

"It's actually been designed by a graphic design company in New York City to make us feel this is nostalgia at its peak."

So much for global warming and a carbon footprint, right?

The rest of the article talks about marketing in general, and its affects on society. I just thought you'd be interested in the Whole Foods part--I know I was, and I've never shopped in one. We don't have one here, but one's coming in 2012.

This just makes me wonder if the other health food stores are up to the same thing...all the more reason to grow your own, or join a CSA--no marketing, and no fakey heart-string-pulling cardboard boxes (or jars, or cans) from a fictitious farm!

Whole Foods sounds like the Starbucks of food: they buy the cheapest stuff they can get, then bring it home and decorate it so it will sell. By coffee decoration, I'm referring to the whipped cream, flavored syrups, caramel/chocolate drizzle, whatever it takes to make the stuff drinkable, and will have people forking over ungodly sums for what starts as inferior coffee. They even went so far as to invent a new language for coffee sizes just to add to the cachet of holding a paper cup from Starbucks.

Marketing--it's all marketing. If you'd like to read a really good book on it, get a copy of Undercover Economist.

My own health food store puts all its produce in plain plastic bins, wooden crates, or clear plastic bags (depending on size of produce)--no ads anywhere. They don't make enough money to start creating boxes of non-existent farms purely for display. Besides--cardboard wouldn't hold up very well in their walk-in refrigerator room.