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Since moving to the South End, I have come to really enjoy this place - Lionette’s Market.  Sometimes I’ll go in just to poke around and marvel at what they have. Truly amazing, 100% local and organically grown meats, produce, and various provisions. 2nd best steak I’ve ever had, I made myself from a rib-eye I bought here.

i signed up for their email newsletter, and at the end, after all the specials, recipes, new additions, there was a long paragraph about branding and marketing, which made me feel…well, a lot of things. Proud of a member of my community, ashamed at myself a little for falling victim, and not thinking about the bigger picture. Normally I wouldn’t throw up 2 posts in a day, but because it really made me thing, I’m going to reprint it here, and give the folks at Lionette’s all the credit for this. If you have time, read it, and know that it comes from someone who is saying “Fuck branding, fuck marketing - we need to figure out the right thing to do.” Enjoy.

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Marketing and Branding.

There are a lot of people making a lot of money manipulating all of us everyday. And we seem to welcome it. We desire the simplicity, the quick fix sense of belonging, and the wonderful pre-packaged individual identity, simply and efficiently expressed through what we buy. Personality by association. Using a visa card to buy a loaf of bread makes you a winner like the Olympic athletes. Clearly, if you cough up the couple of bucks in US currency you are some kind of outdated loser. Buying organic food at responsible supermarkets like Whole Foods, Shaw’s, Stop and Shop, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s shows that you are aware that there is a problem with our food supply, and you are being responsible.

Well, at least that is how the brand is marketed. Are all of those chain supermarkets (some of them found all across the country, one in particular, whose initials are WH, is an international corporation now) suddenly saving us from all the filthy mass-produced foods that were killing our environment, our communities, our neighborhoods, our bodies, our futures, and our kids? Thank god, because clearly before these chain supermarkets people were ignorant fools that could not feed themselves properly. You, the consumer are smarter than the ‘old way’ of supermarkets of yesteryear, and these new supermarkets are there for you. Now every chain supermarket offers local or organic food. Organic and local are the new market brands. Every one of them (as well as many restaurants) has few tokenistic lines of organic or local food, but they all are heavy on marketing and branding.

If these corporations really understood the problem that they themselves have created, with a globalized food supply and aggressive marketing of cheap, unhealthy filthy food, why is it that most of what they stock on their shelves is the same awful, food? It is like their tokenistic local or organic lines are just part of their marketing budget. Again, the majority, and sometimes all of the food offered at chain supermarkets are neither good, clean, nor fair, and certainly NOT sustainable. Supermarkets, regardless of how they brand themselves, are not sustainable.

And so where is your brand allegiance? Coke or Pepsi? Remember the horrific cola wars of 80’s and 90’s? Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s? Is Walmart for poor losers and Whole foods for intellectual liberals?

All the supermarkets are the same now. Is Whole Foods really any better than Stop and shop? At least Stop and Shops are regional only, Whole Foods is in several countries and on different continents!!! They have branded themselves, just like Earthbound mesclun. It wasn’t a couple or organic farmers that made Earthbound big, it was some clever marketers.

Advertising is everywhere, and seemingly everything, now. One day in our culture will get you thinking to yourself,

“What is the problem with corn syrup? It’s no worse than sugar. Apparently ExxonMobil has conquered malaria, educated all of Africa and is soon going to have a car for the world that is completely independent of oil. It is clever marketing and it makes you feel good. SUV’s are now ‘green’! Whose says an SUV cannot be fuel efficient?”

These people will say anything. They rely on people remembering the buzzwords, just to get you to pledge allegiance to their certain brand.

So hopefully I got you to think of Whole foods as the same kind of malevolent corporate losers as ExxonMobile. You should. Supermarkets are dependent on a food supply chain that is cheap, efficient, profitable and gives Americans whatever they want whenever they want it. This new food supply of the past sixty years is in part, the reason why our climate is burning up, our land is polluted and devastated, our farms are disintegrating and being replaced by factory farms, our meats are so full of drugs that they would be banned from every professional sport, cheap food prices are rising, and our neighborhoods seem to lack any sense of community cohesion. And we still trust them because of their marketing! There seems to be a trend in our country to reward the people who screw up everything and to continue with systems that are an absolute failure. It seems to be the fundamental principle in our economy.

What about Lionette’s Market? Well we have not spent nearly as much on marketing and brand research as the chain supermarkets. But I guess our associations and name branding are with people in our community. We work with around 200 local farmers and producers over the course of the year. We have never had to put out a recall on our beef, tomatoes, or spinach for e-coli. Can Whole Foods or Shaws claim that? All of us who own and work at Lionette’s are also part of your community. Trader Joe’s claims to be a ‘neighborhood supermarket’ too, every single one of them across the country selling their pizza from Italy and cheddar cheese from Australia (too bad for you Vermont and Wisconsin cheese makers!).

When people see you walking down the street with a Lionette’s bag, they say to themselves, “that person is intelligent, concerned, motivated, and a part of their community.” They think, “that person gets it.”