Complex Numbers

To Market, To Market

I've done entries about avocados before. Here are a couple: "The Devil's Avocat"  and "Another Avocado Article" . This one's not about the fruit so much as it is about the product.

How Marketing Changed the Way We See Avocados  
Once upon a time, Americans didn't know what to do with "alligator pears." Now we can't get enough

I have a confession to make: When I was a kid, I hated avocados. "Zaboca" as they are called in Trinidad (and maybe elsewhere in the Caribbean) were mushy and gross, in my young, uninformed opinion. They just didn’t taste like anything. Plus, I believed my parents ate some weird things in general.

I'm pretty sure all kids, from all cultures, have different approaches to food than adults. Hell, most of 'em probably don't like beer, even. But we usually grow up to actually like some of those yucky things mom and/or dad tried to shove down our gullets when we were little.

In the beginning of the 20th-century, they were called “alligator pears.” Their bumpy, olive skin connected them to those denizens of the swamp, and it’s shape resembled, well, a pear.

They had a marketing problem.

In addition to already discussing avocados, I've mentioned a few marketing problems in here before. Can't be arsed to find those entries, but I vaguely remember something about orange juice. And maybe chicken wings.

Along these lines, the California Avocado Grower’s Exchange launched a petition to change the name of the fruit, formally. They were pushing to get back to the cultural roots of avocados: The word “avocado” is derived from the Aztec “ahuacacuahatl.” This renaming was meant to further exoticize the product, lending credence to the idea that it was a special treat.

Another source puts it as āhuacatl. I don't know enough about the Aztec language to know if someone made a mistake or if maybe they used both words, or the one was a shortening of the other. Doesn't matter much, I suppose, but I do like to get these things right.

That was all well and good until nutrition experts began to promote a low-fat diet.

Wait, I thought that wasn't a thing until like the 1990s. Is this article skipping whole decades?

The public didn’t differentiate between saturated fats, which were target of this movement, and monounsaturated fats, which are “good” fats. Avocados came under fire.

Avocados under fire are disgusting. No, seriously, nothing's worse than a heated avocado.

So the avocado growers rallied. They funded research and put out studies meant to extoll the virtues of the fruit.

This. This is why people don't trust nutrition science.

The turning point for avocados was their integration with the [name of copyrighted sportsball game that takes place in Feburary redacted].

With enough money, anyone can advertise anything during that game and people will flock to it. If you put a halftime ad there selling boxes of unprocessed human shit, your shit supply would run out the next day.

The public’s investment and interest in the Su[bleep]wl cemented guacamole as a snack item, giving the avocado a foothold it needed. Access to avocados also increased as the previous ban on the import of this item was lifted in 1997, and fruits from Michoacan began to flow across the border.

Then why do I remember avocados from way back in the 70s? It's possible my memory is faulty, or maybe I shifted timelines.

At the end of the day, avocados have a place on today’s table thanks in part to a tireless campaign to redefine and redraft their identity. Some of it was misguided, some of it was weird and some of it was good. That is the nature of advertising.

I put up marketing articles here from time to time because many writers need to know how to do marketing. I mean, I would, but no matter how much I learn about it, I'm utterly incompetent at marketing (maybe because I won't pay for an ad spot during the game-that-shall-not-be-named). Doesn't stop me from reading about it, though.