COMMODIFYING 'SUSTAINABILITY'
On 7-30-08 in The Morning News, the “Novozymes” company, “Doing Business in Bentonville,” purchased a half-page ad in TMN to announce a free breakfast and lunch at the Clarion Hotel to introduce its “Sustainable Solutions—Designing Your Products for the Better.”
Experts in biofuels, sustainable detergents and textiles, food and nutrition, biological cleaning, and organic plant care will be on hand.
It’s a claim familiar since the beginning of advertising a hundred years ago: Better! The old undefined comparative: better than what or to what degree? Better .00000000000001%?
Takes your breath away to see Novozmes think they can fool anybody with that trick today. But what I enjoyed the most was the Latin. All of us who like words—and that’s everybody with a critical lobe — will be stopped by “novozymes.” That’s arresting. New Ferment. How do they define it in the ad: Rethink Tomorrow.
You can almost see the ad team brainstorming and getting all excited as they imagined us getting all excited over the words and hurrying out to buy. For as the ad also says: Novozymes just wishes to “share their expertise on sustainable technology — why and what you can do to design and manufacture your products to meet the needs and wants of consumers — and retailers alike!” And what are the needs and wants of consumers and retailers? Living in a world, living life-styles of significantly reduced CO2?! A genuinely new ferment? A true rethinking for 350 PPM? It’s better to not mention any of that. Dick 8-5-08
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