“You made it up, didn’t you?” That’s the kind of responses we expect from the following quicky quiz, illustrating a few of our beliefs about successful marketing.

We freely admit the format is borrowed. It’s our own version of the popular Bluff The Listener quiz on National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” show, in which listeners are asked to choose the real bizarre news story from among the made up ones.

Marketing truth is stranger than fiction?
You choose: Which ones are real? Which ones did we make up?
1. A church offers a 2-for-1 special on two important sacraments when purchased together.
2. People’s bodies become an interactive broadcast medium for marketers’ promotional videos.
3. Major automobile brands use targeted marketing to reach a new audience of best prospects: Animals.
4. Responding to Coors Light’s color-changing aluminum can, a beer brand runs a “the difference is clear” campaign featuring its new transparent aluminum can.
5. A major supermarket chain offers “grow your own” baby chickens for customer to take home and raise.

They’re all true…sort of
We cheated a little here, because all five examples describe actual marketing programs. Or at least, potential programs for which the technology exists…they just require a willing marketer to take advantage of it.
1.    The Church of England is offering marriage and the baptism of children as an all-in-one package deal, in an appeal to cohabiting unmarried couples in an increasingly secular Britain. Sometimes successful marketing requires the sacrifice of sacred cows.
2.    The Greener Gadgets Design Competition unveiled a touch screen that can be tattooed under the skin, so marketers can use customers’ bodies to screen promotional videos. It’s the ultimate personal endorsement, where the medium is just as important as the message.
3.    Both Toyota and Honda are targeting dog owners with Fido-friendly special features and promotions. This is one way to market to decision influencers.

4.    Yes, now there is such a thing as transparent aluminum, so beer marketers will be able to leverage the taste perception advantages of glass without the cost and weight. The right packaging can put your product one up on competition.

5.    To satisfy demand for more locally grown foods, UK-based Tesco supermarkets will go beyond selling vegetable seeds, offering live chickens and egg-laying hens. This way customers grow their own product– what better way to build a relationship?

Right now big food – American agribusiness – is threatened by the same kind of decades-long trend that lead to the Big 3 automakers’ current sorry state. Will the trend to sustainable agriculture and locally-grown foods make Hamburger Helper and Hostess Twinkies go the way of the Hummer?  Will the Snickers bar suffer the same fate as Saturn?

My family became part this trend. Before we ever heard the term “localvore,” we were buying most of our fruits and vegetables from the farmer’s market a few blocks from home. And we joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm south of Chicago; each week we receive an e-mail from the farmer and a big cardboard box full of assorted produce. No cultural or political statement was intended; we did it just because the product was good and the price was right. And we still eat our fair share of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

The trend is growing. U.S. Department of Agriculture data from 2007 reports that 12,549 farms in the United States market products through a community supported agriculture arrangement.  And between 1994 and 2008, the number of U.S. farmers markets increased from 1755 to 4685.

It’s a fragmented movement. Marketing is local, word of mouth and social media. But it all adds up: one family’s purchases can total several thousand dollars a year. Could this be a threat to agribusiness giants like Kraft Foods, Tyson, Nestle, Dole and others?

In the short term, probably not. But in the longer term…maybe:
•    My local supermarket, which used to sell sweet corn that was indistinguishable from feed corn for cattle, now sells really fresh corn at prices lower than the farmers market.
•    Eating Well magazine reports on how a poor rural town in Vermont has become foodie mecca, with a restaurant on Conde Nast Traveler’s 2009 hot list. In Vermont, the localvore trend extends into the mainstream, to the food service operations at local schools. This helps rebut the claim that eating local is a luxury that’s only meaningful and affordable for people with money.
•    And in New York City there’s now a local bottled water brand – Tap’dNY- that comes straight out of the city water system.

There are some signs that big food is responding to the trend. For example:
•    Kraft Salad Dressings ran a recipe contest that incorporated a “secret” locally-grown ingredient.
•    Canadian Pizza, a trade journal for pizzerias, suggested that readers create a featured “Hundred Mile Pizza” product using local ingredients.
•    Campbell’s “Help Grow Your Soup” campaign extends the company’s support for local farms, using ingredients grown within 100 miles of its production facilities.

But these responses are mainly me-too lip service:
•    They slap words like “natural” onto their labels, imitating GM’s attempt to market a compact luxury car by slapping a “Cadillac Cimarron” nameplate onto a Chevy Cavalier.
•    Instead of starting to align their mainstream brands with growing consumer preferences, they lock truly natural and/or locally-grown products into niche categories. (One reason why agribusiness is buying smaller organic food processors across the U.S. and around the world.)
•    Most important, big food companies do not seem to have any real business strategy for countering this competitive threat to their brands.  They behave as if customers can be satisfied with marketing tactics alone (like the examples in the previous paragraph), that it’s not necessary to make major changes in food production and distribution.

Over the next few decades, we see a gradual erosion of big food’s share of market.

Could this lead to a government bailout of big food, somewhere around 2029? Or will it be business as usual, as big food’s economies of scale prevail over the natural food and localvore trends?