Transcription:

00:00
Chatter That Matters is the podcast. Tony Chapman is the chatterer that’s here. Tony, what’s going on with the podcast? What’s happening this week so we can tell everybody? I love the idea of the chatterer. I have a guest who, Amra, who survived the Bosnia genocide and when Muslims were attacked. And the reason why I wanted to pick this story is I’m trying to understand why is it that

00:28
certain humans, sadly those that sometimes find their way into power, think that it’s within their right to not only eradicate religious beliefs or spiritual beliefs, but to actually try to wipe out an entire civilization. Why are they wired this way? And why is she so interesting? Is she became a refugee, ended up in the United States, didn’t know a word of English, became a PhD, and

00:59
she’s spending her entire life now trying to find the answers to why there’s genocide. And more importantly, trying to get to the root of it so that she can eradicate this kind of mentality that some humans have where they feel so superior over the others. So it’s really an interesting show about someone that should just be so angry and so bitter. And I mean, her story is horrific, but instead she said what the world needs is more love.

01:27
and I’m gonna use my degree and my platform and my context to find it. So it’s a beautiful story. All right, Tony Chapman, I’m Shade Hewitt. It is a conversation that we like to bat the ball around a little bit and I’ve been thinking a lot about packaging lately, Tony, and how things get packaged and it really, that’s a conversation we can have week over week over week because how you package it, how you present it, how you talk about it, it’s really just packaging and.

01:56
But we land on this one particular article about things that were packaged in a way that they changed our behavior, which is fundamentally what marketing is. That’s your background. And we don’t really realize, I work in this multimedia platform and we market too. And I just believe that there’s a kind way of marketing and then there’s an evil way of marketing. And you can use it for good, you can use it for evil. And there’s an element that wants to unmarket my life.

02:24
When we look at our lives today, especially as we tiptoe into the fall and all the traditions that we have coming up, things like Thanksgiving, Christmas, all those things that happen through the course of the year, there’s so many things that we do every day that was nothing but great marketing that has changed our behavior forever. It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s a question. I mean, you think of how many occasions were invented. I worked on Hallmark cards for years and next thing you know, there’s a Mother’s Day card.

02:51
Valentine’s Day card. We’ll have a Father’s Day card. We’ll have a I love grandparents card. I mean, the behaviors that marketers have brought in. I’ll give you a story that, you know, there’s a very famous PR guy Norton years ago and the tobacco industry wanted women to smoke. And in those days, women only hid, if they had a smoking habit, they did it in their house. It was considered very shameful for a woman to

03:21
to take that outside. And so as the suffragette movement happened, he started getting people to raise their hands, almost like they’re fingering somebody, but in it they had a cigarette and they called it torches of freedom. And so they packaged up smoking as a statement of his tribe saying it’s women’s rights. So marketers can do things in the most manipulative way and marketers can do things in, as you said, from the heart. But ultimately what they want.

03:50
is a share of your wallet. Recipes is on the list. I think it was the pineapple, Dole pineapple is a great example of that that we saw in this article that had been shared with us of things that we incorporate into our everyday that were nothing but ideas of a marketer on how to sell more pineapples, right? Like this is some cool stuff. Yeah. I mean, this is, listen, again, you I’ve been in these boardrooms and they’re going, how do I get, you have two choices. Can I find new users, people that have never tried pineapples, very expensive. You got to get them to taste it.

04:19
and decide they’re going to buy that instead of apples, or can you get existing pineapple users to buy more? And so they started putting it in a can and they started doing the pineapple upside down cake and the moles and all the things they went with. Jell-O is another one where they suddenly put bananas inside Jell-O and you’ve got yourself a nutritious dessert. And all of it is just to signal to the consumer, I’m going to, if you don’t know you have this need, and quite honestly, many times you never had this need.

04:47
But if I signal it the right way, and I show you by the way, serving this and your family smiling that are excited and they think you’re the super mum or dad for doing it, there’s a good chance I’m gonna convince you that fresh fruit cut up and put in a can, not even sure how long ago, and served up out of your pantry is a great way to provide nutrition to your family. Do you follow, are you a mindful person? Do you like to follow mindful people online? Absolutely.

05:17
It’s interesting, isn’t it? How it’s the same tactics. Like people, people go to social media and they’re trying to find somebody who reinforces positivity and learn how to say no and, um, how to, you know, bring positivity to a conversation, you get a great outcome and it’s, it’s, it’s exactly the, the mindful conversation that gets fed to us online about easy, simple tactics on how to bring positivity in your life are exactly the same tactics of good marketing. Well, it’s that, you know, you think about the mindfulness industry.

05:46
the self-help industry. I mean, I would tell you 30 years ago, you might’ve find five self-help books. Now it’s two full stacked aisles in a bookstore. And it’s all about creating this itch and this tension point. I’ll give you another example, which is a little more frightening. My daughter has studied psychology and I got her master’s in psychology. And she said, when they started creating the book of mental health, it was about, I might get the numbers wrong, 200 pages.

06:16
And Big Pharma got involved and started investing in these universities. And that 200 pages became 2000 pages. And in each page was a different mental illness and a pharmaceutical product that could help cure it. So, you know, marketing isn’t as just not just as innocent as, can I sell you more pineapples? There’s times when marketing is, if I create this need state by, and I’m not saying it was fabricated, but I mean, I

06:43
It has to be a lot of air and rarefied air that you can go from 200 pages to several volume book on mental health and attached to it is prescription drugs. It’s something we have to always be aware of that what we consume and what we eat very often isn’t determined by us, but by the marketing cues that we’re given on a daily basis.

07:05
I think it was the Canadian food guide. Remember back in the 80s when they first came out with the Canadian food guide and everybody took it as gospel that this is the way it’s supposed to be and involved in that were all kinds of lobby groups to make sure that they had their little pie of the chart so they could sell milk and sell meat and sell veggies and all the other bits and pieces that were on there. That’s a great example of we as a society took it as gospel forever, for a very long time.

07:32
If you could ever trace back to show me the money, and as you said, the lobbyists, the influence policy, the influence shareholders are lobbyists. They’re saying to the food companies, I want to have more profit. So if you really pull back, you could ever pull back the kimono and you wonder how many decisions are made because they’re absolutely right for the consumer versus decisions where I might be challenged to find more profitability.

08:00
I might be, you know, and when you talk about, look at the great one is processed cereal, you know, cartoon characters, start of a perfect breakfast, part of a perfect breakfast. Never said they were a perfect breakfast, part of it. You saw the orange juice, the whole wheat toast, you know, the glass of milk, but then you saw a bowl of cereal that was just absolutely processed corn, already bad for you, jacked up with processed sugar and then marshmallows and then chocolate and then everything else that went with it. And then they talk about marketing is if you took a grocery cart.

08:29
into a store and you had the kid perched in that little seat, guess where those sugared cereals were sold? Right at high level. You went after the honeycomb decoder ring and everything else that went with it. And it’s all designed and packaged to seduce you. And this is why consumers, and nowadays, because of social media and how easy it is to put things out without any data or integrity.

08:56
We’re even more in danger of being manipulated and believing that if we put this drop on our hair, our hair is going to grow back in two weeks. At least with big business selling hope, they had to have some legitimacy or at least enough statements of well, the side effects. But nowadays with social media, I really worry about it because it’s a free for all on the consumer’s wallet. And at times, I think not only can it endanger your physical health, but your mental health.

09:24
I would say perhaps even your mental health more so. And that’s just an observation, but I think it’s a valid one. And don’t forget, you can’t just be a scientist because you say you’re a scientist. There actually is a definition to science. Tony Chapman, appreciate you being your brother as always. Always, we’ll chat soon.