Sneaky Strategies

When marketing & PR cause more harm than good.

Photo by Tiffany Nutt on Unsplash

While working on [Im]Possible Business, inevitably, I've had a steady stream of conversations and thoughts that I wish I could add, couldn’t jam in lest the zine morphs into some ungodly 20,000 page un-plublishable tome. The reality is, so many of us are making “uncapitalistic” choices in our businesses every day. It’s just a matter of training your eye to see them.

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One example that'll have to wait till the 2nd edition:

I write about business models that play with pricing and reparations in their models, but didn't get to the case of a bike shop in Oakland that launched a reparations-based bicycle program back in 2021. With the program Black customers could buy a bike (the shop builds a pretty particular style of custom built wheels) at a 45% discount.

Well, the experiment didn't last long.

The right wing came for them, it only took about a week before the first threat of a 'discrimination' lawsuit. At a certain point the owner had to privilege the safety of employees over the program, and closed it amongst a barrage of escalating violent threats.

We know there's a huge contingent of white nationalists in this country ready to mobilize when people try to care for other people in ways that counter their fascist beliefs.

What I've been pondering in particular is the role that regular old marketing and PR played in the blow back. The owner is pretty well connected in the "doing good business" world, with friends high up at Patagonia and REI, and published a big old manifesto of a press release that led to many interviews. National coverage of the program fanned the mob flames and here we are.

So I've been thinking about the value of subversion and being a lot quieter about our experiments in change and repair. There's a need, on a movement level, for large scale, loud, demonstrative. But maybe a tiny business isn't always the best venue for actions that attract attention?

The lesson here is not that reparations-based pricing is too risky, or that small businesses shouldn't run experiments in modeling repair. The lesson is more about how we go about those experiments.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a concept in anarchist praxis that calls for spaces that disappear before the state can catch them or employs guerilla tactics to fly under the radar. This is a useful concept for change-makers: What if the bike shop had used word of mouth to sell bikes? Or neighborhood flyers instead of an internet manifesto? What would a sneaky strategy have looked like?

The tools of marketing and PR might be great for selling more stuff, but they also might undermine when our efforts aren't about business growth. Much more to say on this topic, and would love to hear your thoughts on business, social change experiments, and sneaking around, if you have them.

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