Calling out the marketers: another reason I love Michelle Obama

Today, I saw an excerpt of Michelle Obama's address about fighting childhood obesity to the Grocery Manufacturer's Association. The thrust of her argument was two pronged: first, healthy food needs to be easily available and affordable, and second, nutritional information must be intelligble for parents making family food decisions. I was half listenting to the television and half reading my email. Then I heard her say:

But what it doesn't mean is taking out one problematic ingredient, only to replace it with another. While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn't. And it doesn't mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones -- for example, adding a little bit of Vitamin C to a product with lots of sugar, or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat doesn't suddenly make those products good for our kids.

This isn't about finding creative ways to market products as healthy. As you know, it's about producing products that actually are healthy -- products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation.

Did I just hear her slam marketers and marketing in the solar plexus? I found this so refreshing because she was talking about something serious and substantial--she was not dancing around an issue with talking points, avoiding talking about something or letting her opponents define the discourse. And she did it in a civil, charming, "as parents, grandparents and humans we certainly all care about this issue" tone. But there was no mistake that she was advocating for a seismic shift in the grocery manufacturing industry.

And she goes on to say:

So today I want to challenge each and every one of you to go back to your companies, take a look at your marketing budgets and ask some questions. For example, when you put money into reformulating a product to make it healthier, do you then invest enough in marketing that product to kids and parents? Or is most of the marketing budget still going to the less healthy versions? In other words, which products are you really selling? And what kinds of messages are your advertisements sending?

Continuing to call out the 800 lbs gorilla in the room! Throughout the speech she talks about how children (using her own children as examples) respond to marketing the difficulty busy parents have evaluating requests for this or that type of food. She acknowledges how effective marketing campaigns are and then calls out marketers doing their jobs well with unhealthy products. By insisting that that the discussion include all aspects of the childhood obesity morass, she is attempting to circumvent a marketing campaign that forgets/limits information about nutritional value.

I used to think that marketing was fluff. It certianly wasn't anything I was interested in. At various points in my professional life I have had to deal with marketing, marketers and market research. Personally, I think it is all a house of cards, a fantasy world and, recently I have decided, an obtuse type of communication. Messaging becomes more important than discussion. Each group focuses only on their agenda, ignoring aspects of the issues that are uncomfortable, don't fit into the message and are complicated.

Also on the local news they ran a feature on the reaction of local people who are undecided about the healthcare issue to the advertising barrage. One woman complained that the issue was too complicated and she didn't understand commercials for either side--she wanted the simple version. Sometimes stuff isn't simple and people have to think about stuff. This made me sad and frustrated. I know that I could dismiss the woman as lazy and ignorant (which she probably was), but it made me realize people are now trained to expect the simple version of anything. What if there isn't a simple version? What if it is complicated, difficult and fluid?