As a millennial my 1990’s childhood was the target of the most sophisticated and prolific marketing aimed at children in history to that point. My generation has an inherent understanding of marketing and sales, we could point out product placement by the time we were 8 and we can automatically recall far more brand logos than we can plant or bird species.
Our vocabulary included understanding buzz words like ‘new’ and ‘extreme’; it was the age of purple ketchup and crystal Pepsi, any gimmick to sell, sell, sell to the emerging market of children.
You may think I should use my birthright marketing degree to promote my passion, conservation. I could make it flashy and hip, but it just doesn’t come naturally. Conservation is beyond buzzwords. If I encourage someone to sign up or donate to protect our planet, I hope they do it because there is inherent meaning and value in it to them, not because I have persuaded them. I’d rather awaken a moral belief that was waiting to be roused.
But why? Don’t the ends justify the means?
I am passionate about conservation; I would guess that I think about it once a minute through my day. It weaves its way into every decision I make, everything I cook, everything I buy, everything I consider buying and it is of course my job. So, why wouldn’t I stop at nothing to get the rest of humanity on board?
I wasn’t sure until today.
Today I thought I would try to find some marketing technique, or inspiration for this article.
Nothing much came up, so, in desperation I searched images of ‘conservation,’ and there it was. My answer, the reason I was never able to make conservation sound fresh, cool or radical, because it is so much more.
We are all moved to love nature differently. For some of us it is fishing in a healthy lake, for others it is watching birds flit around a feeder, still others prefer a grand vista, with a beautiful view. There are water babies, and others who like an up-close view of a flower in bud, there is so much diversity in nature, so much to discover, and so much diversity among people that the possibilities are endless. Of course there are the things we are all thrilled by, they are universally sacred, such as seeing a fawn with its mother, a bald eagle catching a fish, or the mac daddy: the night sky.
Conservation reaches us through a unique love that we all share, but it is completely different for each of us.
This is why it is so difficult to get our message across, this is why we can’t just say conservation is a trendy word. This is why you can never quite find a logo that says everything you need it to. Because there is nothing that can equal the power of the whole of our planet celebrating the rare and sacred life that exists on it. It can’t be summed into an article, it can’t be boiled down into a trademark. I can’t catch it, distill it down and give it all to you once a month as I write, no matter how hard I wish I could, because I love this place that we call home, and it loves us.
There is no buzz word that can do it quite as well as the buzz of a bee.
Courtney Barker is the Acquisition, Project & Grants Coordinator at Couchiching Conservancy. This article was originally published in The Villager Magazine.