Once upon a time, I got to see a presentation highlighting key identifying traits of people who are customers of my "day job" business.
Most of it was pretty ordinary and mentioned stuff like "attend high school events" and "think family is important." But one of the identifiers stuck with me.
Our customers, the presenters told us, live near cows.
Now that particular point was a little short on detail. For instance, the presenters didn't spell out exactly how close "near" was, or if that closeness implied any more interaction with the cows than ordering the No. 2, hold the pickle, and yes, I would like to super-size the fries. Presenters also failed to mention whether we were talking dairy or beef. Or why, of all the things a researcher might think are important, bovine proximity might be an indicator of anything.
But, it was a bullet point. And as we all know, if it's a bullet point, it has to mean something.
I'm going to hypothesize here that these particular presenters probably hadn't been much closer to a cow than their loafers. I'm going to suggest that they may have been reading a bit too much into livestock location. And I'm absolutely certain they had no idea that, since we were in Northwest Arkansas, about two thirds of their audience lived near actual livestock.
In other words, that particular bullet point missed the mark.
I did, however, think of that the other day when I turned on the light to see what was going on just beyond my backyard fence. It seems a lot of us live near cows. And some of us live near coyotes.
Now for a little back story: When we first moved to Northwest Arkansas, there were more cows than people in Benton County. And in the space of just a few short (OK, 20-plus, but time is relative here) years, we've acquired a world-class art museum, top-notch medical facilities, a pretty cool airport and traffic jams worthy of much larger cities.
For reasons known only to them, some of our local restaurants feature squid, octopus and sushi on the menu. We have miles of bike paths, and while Arkansas has a long and proud tradition of locally produced spirits, a current batch of entrepreneurs is actually doing it legally, with, you know, permits and sanitary stuff and such.
Yet the thin veneer of civilization falls away pretty quickly up here when the wolves (or at least their much less celebrated cousins) literally show up at the door.
Even a celebrated exaggerator like me would have a hard time convincing anyone I had some "Revenant"-like experience with the coyotes. It was a cow pasture. They're out there. This time, I happened to be outside when they got a little near the fence, but I've actually been closer to lions in the zoo than I was to anything that might have considered me part of the food chain that night.
It is, however, sometimes startling to realize that, despite many of the changes to the landscape and makeup of Northwest Arkansas, we still bump up against nature on a fairly regular if somewhat unscheduled basis.
Deer sightings on the side of the road (and occasional in the front grill of the SUV) are pretty common up here. A few years ago we returned from a day trip to a local park near here to read that a mountain biker in the same location had gotten to play tag with a bear. We tour the lake to see bald eagles and legend has it turkeys would periodically wander into our local airport terminal.
Apparently, you can take a region out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the region.
Which, to be honest, is pretty darn cool. There's definitely a kind of outdoorsy yin and yang to the place, where plaid is more than a fashion statement and it's entirely possible that pickup truck was used for more than hauling the kids' play yard.
About the time we want to get all Andy Warhol and fig-and-goat-cheese bruschetta up here, the birds and the bees and the coyotes tend to remind us who we are. And that we should definitely wipe our boots at the door.
As long as they stay on their side of the fence, I don't really mind our nocturnal visitors. After all, they were here first, and they don't seem to mind me all that much.
So while I'm not quite sure just what difference living near cows makes to marketing researchers, I know what difference it makes to me. It means I'm home.
Commentary on 02/19/2016