When a group of people showed up for a lesson on innovation and marketing, they figured they would leave with some useful information. What they learned surprised them. By the end of the presentation, they were all bothered by what they had learned.

The speaker started out by offering up some secrets.

She said:

“I’m going to give you some of the secrets about how we make you buy what we want you to buy. So, as a marketer, when I’m first given a project, what’s my job? Well, my job is to make you want it, to crave it, to need it, to think that it is the best innovation in food since sliced bread.

“So how do you make the public feel OK with this? How does that happen? My job. How do I do it? I use the language of innovation.”

Then she went on to give some examples of innovation.

She talked about cake mixes and how many wives felt like it was cheating when they were first released. She explained that at one point the cake mixes had everything and even though they were easy to make, women didn’t buy them. The company had to change them so that eggs and water could be added, so women still felt like they were baking things for their families.

She also talked about a cereal that didn’t sell well when it was first released, but when the company changed the shape, it became one of the most popular cereals in the UK.

She also used the idea of chickens and pigs and where they come from. She explained why marketing can sell things that people wouldn’t want if they knew the truth about them.

“Let’s look at technique number one. Everybody believes what’s on the label. So, let’s look at some examples, some of my favorite, some of the ones I use all the time. I’ll use farm fresh. I’ll use 100 percent natural. I’ll use butcher’s choice. But what does that really actually mean? Well, truthfully, it doesn’t mean very much. We see that on the label, we feel a bit more confident.

“But let’s have a look at what a farm really looks like. It probably looks like that. Now, this is a concentrated animal feeding operation. I’m going to run that past you again. It’s a concentrated animal feeding operation. That’s not going to look great on a label, hence we use farm fresh.”

She went on to explain more about what she does.

The audience was interested but also bothered by her examples and explanation. Had they really been fooled into buying things that aren’t what they seem because of marketing and innovation? Kate continued:

“If we looked at a room of about this size and this were turned into a chicken barn . . . it’s a hundred-seat theater. How many chickens could we probably fit in this room now? I’m going to say about 4,000. It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? It’d probably look a little bit like that. Now, the public aren’t going to be massively keen on that idea.

“It’s my job to make them feel a little bit better about it. So how do I do it? Well, a basic principle of marketing. We use the right choice of words, and by using the right choice of words we can make the conversation, we can focus the conversation the way we want it to.”

The audience was starting to understand what she was saying but they were more focused on the cows and pigs than the innovation.

After all, she was telling them about all the things she was also saying they didn’t want to hear or know about.

She added:

“So how do we do it? When you’re in the supermarket, you don’t want to think about where those products come from. You don’t want to think about how those animals have been reared, how they’ve been treated. The power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated. This is systemized cruelty on a massive scale and we only get away with it because everyone is prepared to look the other way. Thank you.”

At the end of the presentation, very few people in the audience could clap.

In fact, most of them just looked around at each other in disgust. What they thought was a lesson in marketing turned out to be a lesson in animal cruelty and meat production. The speaker, Kate Milles, is an actress, not a real marketing expert, but the facts she offers to the audience are real. Everyone walked away a little more knowledgeable – and a little more concerned.

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By Cedric Jackson

hi@sbly.com

Cedric Jackson is a contributor at SBLY Media.