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Lemme tell you a story.
There was this planet—let’s call it “Earth”—where non-people (called “publicly held corporations”) perfected some great sales techniques. They were so great that they worked even for non-people selling to actual people. These techniques used science and research to figure out how to get real people to buy lots of stuff from non-people.
It worked so great that Angela couldn’t sell her hand made soap to her neighbors. Even her friends Ron and Belinda and Pepe bought their soap from non-people. The non-people got very rich and Angela had real trouble paying her rent. But she kept making soap because she was so good at it, she loved doing it, and she hoped someday her friends and neighbors—and maybe even people she hadn’t met yet—would buy her soap.
Nope. The non-persons—let’s think of them as zombies—sold the soap.
Angela’s soap cost more than the soap sold by the zombies. The zombie soap was made cheaply by machines or by really poor desperate people. Who knows how they got the stuff? But the secret of their success was the brilliant zombie marketing.
Of course, everyone knew the “secrets” of zombie marketing: search engine optimization, headline writing techniques, Google advertising, and a few simple tricks to fool the human brain. The thing is, the non-persons could afford to buy more zombie marketing than actual persons like Angela. She, no, all of the actual people, were out of luck.
Angela pulled out a soap box, put it out in front of her shop. She stood on top of it and talked with real people as they passed by.
Hello, everyone. Anyone. I’m your neighbor and your friend, Angela. I make soap.
I make my soap myself, by hand, using clean pure ingredients that I carefully pick out. I work hard at it, but I don’t think about it as work because I love making it so much. I have a secret ingredient: joy. It’s how I feel when I make soap and it smells and feels perfect.
The making of the soap, that’s for me, that’s something I do and love to do. But the soap itself, it’s for all of us. Please buy some so I can afford to keep making it, so I can continue to experience—and share—joy.
Soon Ron and Belinda and Pepe were buying their soap from Angela. And they spread the word about Angela’s soap and her joy. They told people directly. They wrote and shared fables about Angela and her soap. They put signs in the windows of their homes and stenciled chalk pictures of her soap at major intersections.
They communicated to actual persons using the words and pictures and smiles and feelings of actual persons. They did something that zombie marketing could only simulate: they looked people in the eye and actually connected.
Soon Ron and Belinda and Pepe were working with Angela, making and selling soap. More and more actual people learned about Angela’s soap, bought it, and experienced the joy of connecting with neighbors, of using products that are created by actual people to be experienced, not just sold.
And that was just the start. Because Ron and Belinda and Pepe discovered other things they loved to create and sell and share. And they did.
Zombie marketers grumbled. Their products were cheaper and scientifically better, they claimed. But they lost the community. Since the zombie marketers still had most of the Earth to sell to, they soon forgot Angela and her neighborhood.
So, the joy continued and spread slowly across the Earth, person to person. And that’s how joy came to be on a planet once ruled by zombies.
