Good evening Peter. I'll agree completely that advertising is necessary for
a healthy business. We advertise our products too, for all the same reasons
you gave. Perhaps a better statement would have been to somehow quantify
the volumes of advertising they use. What I was thinking as I wrote that,
was the massive amounts of marketing we get every week in our mailbox, from
a very short list of agrichemical companies, trying over and over to get us
to buy their products. They use full-color two page ads in all our farming
magazines. Plus the mailers to our PO box, plus the counter displays at the
farm store, plus the "workshops" and "field days" to demo their latest
chemicals, plus all the other marketing campaigns. It's relentless. I
attended a few of those field days and came away feeling like I'd just
voluntarily participated in a brainwashing session. That's what I was
reacting to. I've even spotted so-called "news" articles which if you look
carefully are just one long infomercial, where all the scientists
interviewed worked for them, and the information being presented was "this
is the only way to do this". I seem to recall at least one of those
articles being presented here, as if it were an objective news story. Then
I hear or read comments on lists like this where it's assumed that chemical
ag is the only way to do something, and that sounds just like the pitch I
heard during their hosted field days. For anyone who didn't have
alternative information, that might sound like a reasonable statement. But
we've been living the proof that there are alternatives. Perhaps I'm just a
small voice hollering about those alternatives, but I'll keep hollering.
And I'll keep chucking their sales flyers in the recycling can. Perhaps
they'll eventually have real value as compost somewhere.
Kathryn Kerby
Frogchorusfarm.com
Snohomish, WA
-----Original Message-----
From: Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Loring Borst
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2014 3:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BEE-L] nsecticides which show the least toxicity to bees
The fact that they have to continue
to pour so much money into marketing should be the dead giveaway that
they're working really hard to sell us something we don't actually need.
Hi Kathryn,
Thanks for chiming in. I think you have a valid argument and posed it in a
fair manner. Up to the last sentence, that is. It is incorrect to say that
advertising is a reflection of an unsellable product.
For example, if I have honey to sell, and nobody knows it, I may have it for
a long time. I may prefer to sell by word of mouth, but if somebody else is
advertising all over town, that person might fill all my potential
customers' cupboards with honey. So, advertising is a legitimate form of
communication, especially necessary in a competitive market.
To tar somebody because they spend a lot of money on advertising is a poor
tactic. Advertising keeps media such as newspapers, magazines and web sites
afloat. Thanks for listening.
PLB
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