Corporate style ‘status marketing’ is in danger of turning organic food and farming into its own antithesis, claims the journalist and film-maker Tom Levitt.
Writing in The Ecologist. Levitt says that the “corporate takeover” of organic has led to its being positioned increasingly as a premium health option. Marketers, he says, have “played on aspiration” turning “organic into the antithesis of its original goal: an elitist consumer choice”
Levitt warns that corporate marketing tactic of “playing to ‘extrinsic’ anxieties about health, security and status” actually discourages socially and environmentally responsible behaviour — even if it persuades them to buy ‘greener’ products in the short term. He writes: “Consumers may buy organic produce without ever taking onboard the wider issues the organic movement cares about.”
