In a recent trend watching blogpost, the author details how with the free flow of information to consumers today, many things that allowed us to live in blissful ignorance in the western world are coming to light.  Things like child labour, terrible wages for outsourced jobs, horrible working conditions in developing countries, and even in some cases physical abuse have all been revealed to hide somewhere in the supply chains of the world’s biggest and previously most trustworthy brands.  Consumers these days in the western world can’t consume anything without feeling slightly guilty about where it came from.

This, as the article outlines, is the basis for a new and incredibly powerful form of marketing that they label as GFC, or in other words, “Guilt-free consumption”.  Companies now seem to be competing less and less about the actual product they’re selling and more about how little blood was spilled in its creation.  The more green, the less outsourcing of jobs to the developing world, the better the company and therefore the less guilt a consumer is burdened to carry. In the article they use the example of Tesla with their electric cars to illustrate how consumers are influenced by GFC, however I’ll reference to an early blog post I did on Chipotle.  Chipotle came out with an incredibly powerful advertisement that attempted to highlight the problems with the current food industry, a hot topic on the guilty consumer’s conscience. By painting themselves as away from all the corruption and inhumane ways of bringing food to the table they also distance themselves from the guilt factor that consumers are now used  to bearing.  An emotional release from this kind of burden is incredibly powerful and it’s clear that more and more companies are starting to realize the benefit of GFC.

assuming the glitter came from Bangladesh

silence of the bloggers

I found myself looking through the directory of classmate’s blogs to try to find a topic for this post and the more and more I looked the more I was surprised that people had made themselves private.  Correct me if I’m wrong but I used to think that the point of a blog was to try to get your point across to any pair of eyes that would be willing to sit and put in the effort to read your opinion.  Finally I came upon a familiar name, Gabriela Roestandy, a group member of mine whose blog was not private.  Step one complete!  Going through her blogs I was pleasantly surprised when I found an article of hers that seemed to relate to the concerns I was having early about all these private blogs.

Gabriela’s Blogpost: The Effectiveness of Word of Mouth
https://blogs.ubc.ca/gabyroestandy/2011/11/25/the-effectiveness-of-word-of-mouth-marketing/

In her article she talks about how in this day and age where marketing is more and more centralized around the internet and social media, there’s still compelling evidence to show that word of mouth still has a significant impact on how people consume.  Now in my opinion these forms of communication are not mutually exclusive.  I think social media, in this case specifically blogs, is the digital rendering of word of mouth.  When you put the kind of effort that goes into writing a blog it’s usually because you’re passionate enough to write about it. Privatizing your blogs is silencing your own opinion and that passion, which is unfortunate because there’s a lot to be gained from a variety of opinions being available on a multitude of topics. The reason why message boards like reddit are so popular is it allows this digital word of mouth to be spread anonymously, but even then we see how powerful even this is.

Firstly I’d like to start off by saying that if it weren’t for the great people in my group this assignment could have gone down in a completely different direction.  The material that it required us to delve into seemed simple upon first glance of the outlines, however when we actually got around to doing it we found that everything seemed to need a significant amount of researching and work just to come out with a product of a few hundred words.  Even after we had our ideas out on paper we still found ourselves sounding it back and forth between the members of the group until we finally reached a consensus that we had put forward something worthwhile of handing in.  This process at times was pretty tiring I have to admit, however with the support and humour within our group it made the tasks infinitely easier.  I think this has some strong implications, although nothing revolutionary, about the importance of strong group dynamics in the workplace.  Conversation between group members and the ability for them to band together behind the tasks set infront of them not only makes it a more pleasurable environment for members involved, but actually encourages them to go the extra distance.  By this I mean that if we hadn’t gotten along as we did I could easily have seen us being the type of people to just do our respective parts and throw them all together at the end without a second thought.   You need to have a certain level of comfort with your fellow members to say, “hey, this doesn’t really work that well in the context of what I did, how about we do such and such”, and the benefits this little extra bit provides is huge.

here’s a group photo

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Recently while stumbling through Youtube as I normally do on a lazy day I came across a new commercial for the restaurant chain Chiptole that made me do a double take.  The commercial, garnering a few million views within the first week of it’s release, brings us to a world much like our own where consumers happily enjoy their meals in blissful ignorance of how the food was brought to their plates.  The commercial does an incredible job of highlighting the growing ethical issue of how the big agricultural firms that control the supply for large brand restaurants chains are engaging in many practices that the general public are beginning to rally against, such as the poor treatment of livestock and the use of many GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in our everyday food.  I for one found the commercial to be amazingly powerful and the message truly resounded deeply within me, yet it got me thinking, can a restaurant chain on as large a scale as Chipotle truly follow the values it preaches to the extent which the commercial would let you believe?  In reality Chipotle actually uses a fair amount of GMO’s in many of their signature meals, but overall they’re actually very good.  So what’s the problem you might ask.  The problem in my opinion is that with advertisement this powerful the message can be too linear, Chipotle comes across a small patch of righteousness in an otherwise corrupted world when infact they aren’t immune to the practices they condemn.  It simply means that we as consumers need to be aware of the psychological power effective marketing holds and not allow it to cloud our purchasing judgement as firms would like without proper information.