i still hate millennial branding

and it still never dies

(Previously.)

There’s a dried fruit brand I’ve been seeing around, the premise of which is: we use ugly fruit. You might say “isn’t the premise of a ‘dried fruit brand’ ‘this is dried fruit’” but really, in this case, no, I have to insist, it’s that the fruit is ugly. Every bag says “HELLO! I’M UGLY!” They really want you to know this.

Now I’ve been around the food product branding rodeo long enough to know that stressing the hideousness of your fruit is about food waste. Basically the world is full of perfectly respectable carrots that are fours on the produce beauty scale, and these carrots never get a shot at love because you overlook them in favor of perfectly symmetrical vegetables. I used to buy groceries from a place that specialized in this because it cost less. You can really go down the rabbit hole about food waste and some people seem to think it’s a fake problem because all the ugly fruits and vegetables still have uses. About this I have no opinion but I certainly assume that this brand is sincere, to the extent a brand can be sincere, about raising awareness of food waste.

But—and this is the thought process I go through every time I see one of these bags—isn’t dried fruit already ugly? Like, are we using 10/10 peaches for dried fruit? That would be pretty stupid, and I don’t want to bet against people being stupid. But about the most attractive dried fruit gets is a dried cherry, and that’s just not very attractive.

Now is the dried fruit good? Yes. But is the branding really annoying? Also yes.

Maybe the way in which I’m most out of sync with branding aimed at my own demographic is that I really do not like it when brands try to convince me that I’m doing good by spending money. Almost everybody does it, even companies you’d think really wouldn’t need to. I see it on Substack a lot, both from the greater Substack brand and from individuals who are trying to get an edge. I’ve seen many newsletters go paid and write things like, “it’s a core belief of my politics that [some group I belong to] deserves to be paid, and well, that group includes me.”

I do not blame anybody who does this move, whether sincerely or cynically or both, because marketing is ultimately about what gets people to buy your thing, and if this line is what works, it’s what works. And I get it, it’s weird to ask people for money, and it’s easier to frame yourself as almost obligated on principle to ask for money (because of your politics), rather than asking for money because you are providing a good for which they can exchange coin. But I do not enjoy being on the other end of it. I don’t even like it when I’m dealing with somebody who is publishing a book and they have to do that paragraph about how pre orders are very important, a paragraph I presumably will do myself if I ever have a book come out. I pre-order the books of most people I know for basically this reason, so it’s not that I don’t know that pre-orders are very important. But I don’t like my purchasing of a book being framed as a morally good or even charitable action, which inevitably slips in. If I pay for somebody’s Substack, it’s because I like it, not because principle compels me.

For one thing, in many cases, the “moral” consumer action is actually just to use what you already have. It might true that it’s better for me (environmentally, whatever) to buy a T-shirt that uses organic cotton sewn by unionized yet impoverished widows from a B-corp etc over buying a T-shirt from Old Navy or whatever. But the best thing I can actually do for the environment is not buy a T-shirt. I love buying my indie perfumes but again I’m not striking some kind of moral blow by buying these products, which inevitably involve some amount of single-use plastics and have to be shipped across the country to me. I do not feel bad about this or good about this. These things are just facts.

Of course, I do want companies to pay their employees well, to be environmentally responsible, and so on, in addition to making good products. And if they’re doing that, they should of course use it for advertising, because obviously it works for most people and businesses want you to buy their stuff. It’s not like I want a company to be like: We’re Evil And We Don’t Care. But personally, I just don’t want to feel enlisted into a cause when I buy something. Ultimately, I’m not doing anything except getting some dried peaches. And I ate all my dried peaches.