You can learn a lot about society from a jar of peanut butter.
I’m serious. A man I know told me about touring a peanut butter plant years ago. As jars of the wonderful stuff sped down the line, he noticed that different lines were packing different brands. Do the choosy mothers who choose Jif have their favorite peanut butter packed on the same line as Peter Pan and Bama? Probably not. But the point is this: All that peanut butter came from the same plant, prepared with nearly identical recipes.
The substance was nearly the same. Only the brands and the marketing were different.
So it is today, in the world of consumer products and in politics.
Republican super-salesman (and later prison inmate) H.R. Haldeman gets a lot of credit for selling the idea of electing Richard Nixon as if he were selling a box of soap. He was not the first, but he set the tone for the political landscape today.
The key to marketing a product is to remember this: It does not matter so much what the truth is; rather, it matters what people think the truth is.
When I was a child, Mrs. Olson touted Folgers coffee because it was mountain grown. (“It’s the richest kind!”) Today we know that Nike bids us to “Just Do It.” With a splash of bad grammar, Apple says, “Think Different.” And everyone knows that there’s a candy out there that “melts in your mouth and not in your hand.”
The electorate rejected a president who said he would “Make America Great Again.” His winning opponent offered an aspirational, but hardly verifiable, promise that “Our Best Days Lie Ahead.”
Why do we respond so predictably to advertising claims -- about politics or anything else? Simple: Divining the truth is hard. It also takes a quality most of us lack, as we are never willing to be wrong about anything. We’d rather believe something that is not true with vigor and determination than we would examine our thinking and thus have to sometimes acknowledge that we are either wrong or ignorant.
Advertising appeals to a much more basic part of humanity than intellect and decision making. It appeals to our desire to belong, to our notions of who we are and should be, to who we love and, most of all, to what we fear.
This isn’t matter of political partisanship. It goes far beyond politics. It’s part of our commonly accepted truth which, as it turns out, might not be true at all.
We’ve heard a lot lately about how the truth doesn’t matter. While truth certainly does matter, ideas that are popular but false are nothing new. Did the noble Southern warriors of the Confederacy outfight the Yankees, only to lose because of a lack of material? Did the troops of “Kaiser Bill” march home undefeated in the field, only to be betrayed by the November criminals who sold out Germany to the allies after World War I?
No. Neither of these things are true. They are big lies -- popular, with good marketing, but false.
Will a Democratic administration lead us into the abyss where personal responsibility will be abdicated, with the nanny state reigning supreme? Will brave patriots wearing camo and toting flags and baseball bats have to fight to save the nation?
No. Both ideas -- diametrically opposed and creatures of pure marketing -- are false.
So here is what I would ask of you, me and everyone else in our country: Taste the peanut butter. Forget the label, and examine the real facts.
Stop being an object of the desires of smart marketers and others who play to your fears and hatreds to manipulate you into doing damned near anything they want you to do. Don’t buy it. See what’s really in that jar -- Jif, Skippy, Peter Pan and all the rest. Concentrate on substance, not form.
And when you do that, you’ll see that like those branded jars of goodness, we are more alike than we are different. Hold fast to the substance of what we have stood for these last two centuries plus two score and ten.
Free yourself from the brands imposed on you, and think for yourself. When you concentrate on the substance of who we Americans are, you can see qualities in others that marketing says you shouldn’t.
Those peddling the label don’t want you to open the jar -- which is exactly why you should open it. If we will all see one another for who we really are, the division that cripples us should fall away.
It’s not difficult. In fact, it’s as easy as opening a jar of peanut butter.
Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register and a freelance writer who lives in Baldwin County. Email her at fcoleman1953@gmail.com and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.
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How selling candidates and ideas is like selling peanut butter, and why you should open the jar - al.com
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