#38: On Branding
Alexa, play 'Money Money Money' by ABBA.
Hi friends,
Several months ago, I wrote about the politics of design, and how ‘the flattening of experience design into a framework of consumption rather than of action is dangerous, and depressing. And design can often be hierarchical, gate-kept. It’s a fallacy to think that there’s a visual rubric for radical design… Design, in one sense, peddles a false sense of security in that we ascribe intent to its tenets—but that intent is in fact not intrinsic and can be appropriated, justifiably or not, by others.’ I think a similar point stands when it comes to the vast world of homogeneously bougie, millennial-friendly, often direct-to-consumer product startups and the branding that accompanies them. I read this article, by Ben Schott for Bloomberg, nearly a year ago and still think about it frequently. The article looks at US-based brands (many of which will be familiar to podcast listeners worldwide, LOL), and I’d say there’s a parallel ecosystem in many countries, South Africa included. But the genesis of this specific type of look and feel (and the VC-backed desire to constantly optimise things that don’t much need optimising, is distinctly American). Bootstraps, rugged individualism, blah blah—all that. There’s this notion that a savvy entrepreneur can fill what they perceive as a market gap, but is really less of a gap, per se, than space for optimisation—‘smart’ toothbrushes and the like—which would only feel relevant and/or necessary from the myopic, rarefied vantage point of Silicon Valley tech bros and venture capitalists.
Schott calls startups of this genre ‘blands,’ writing: ‘All startups seek to disrupt and disintermediate a smug status quo, or originate and dominate an entirely new niche. But what makes a brand a bland is duality: claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.’
He outlines several tenets these companies share: they are mostly direct-to-consumer; they present themselves, in their mission/vision/copy, as ‘scrappily uncorporate’ underdogs (despite generally having private equity backing or angel investors); they ‘proffer origin stories that mash up indie-movie “meet cutes” with aspirational “grail quests’; they espouse (vague) liberal values; they allude to (though don’t always follow through on) craftsman quality and ethical processes. Finally, they are ‘aspirational’—affordable luxury, as it were—down-to-earth in the eyes of the actually rich, yet simultaneously a sort of prosperity gospel for the middle class. (In other words, prime territory for podcast ads and influencer marketing).
Of course, as is well-documented, the middle class in America is shrinking. Status anxiety, vis-a-vis consumerism, is therefore rife. Schott quotes Venkatesh Rao, who came up with the term ‘premium mediocre,’ defined thusly: ‘A pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety.’ (Rao talks more about this in this blog post, which is illustrated by the phenomenal chart I’m attaching below:)
This whole conversation gets complicated when one looks at it as a schism of generation or gender, which in many cases it is. Take the female-founded cult athleisure brand Outdoor Voices, as a case study: one of the progenitors of the bland look/vibe. Founder Ty Haney, the golden-girl face of the brand, resigned after leadership disputes with Mickey Drexler, the boomer J. Crew titan who had been brought in to boost OV’s flagging sales. Here, a few truths exist at once: that Drexler’s old-school retail expertise and boy’s-club mentality likely didn’t gel with OV’s preexisting company culture; that Haney and the 15 employees laid off alongside her exit were all young women; but also that prior to Drexler’s arrival OV had been, in fact, haemorrhaging money, more focused on branding, user acquisition, and general disruption than on turning a significant profit. All this to say that there’s a lot to unpack.
But pan out from this particular company, though, and it’s not merely an issue of gender, or boomer vs millennial. It’s also—overlaid over all of that—an issue of class. Blands virtue-signal liberal, but when pushed down to the wire of policy or ethics, they’re not leftist. They’re optimising day-to-day life, if life fits within a specific demographic clientele. Scott points out that the opposite of a bland would be MyPillow—and that both MyPillow’s carelessly un-optimised branding/aesthetic/visual identity and founder Mike Lindell’s famously unhinged, Trump-supporting politics both serve to ‘illustrate the ideological uniformity of blands for whom such statements would be instantly immolating’. Blands are for a self-selecting clientele, essentially, for whom the branding immediately telegraphs it as an ideologically safe, likeminded, bet. The inverse truth to this is that much as blands work extremely hard to intentionally not appeal to the Trumpian masses, they also ignore the other mass of proletariat, i.e. they ignore workers. (Relatedly, as Schott and Rao note, a bland hallmark is to ‘trumpet domestic design’—implicitly communicating quality, localism, etc—while manufacturing offshore.)
The aforementioned value tenets that Schott describes are where brand identity comes into play (and where all of this starts to interest me). Simply put, the blands all look and sound the same. This is no accident. ‘Because they target consumers allergic to marketing,’ Schott explains, ‘blands strive tirelessly to be engagingly unobtrusive and convincingly inevitable.’ Hence, a specific aesthetic lineage emerges. What conveys the intersection of value-driven and nondescript, modern and welcoming, ‘real’ and aspirational, millennial-friendly catnip with a wink and a nod? Well, that would be: cheerfully simple serif-font logos, smart sans-serif copywriting in a tone that is personable yet wholly impersonal, a roster of carefully calibrated diverse yet conventionally attractive models, and a colour palette of bright pastels. Schott writes that ‘many blands attempt to coax users into memberships and subscriptions — using the language of community and convenience to create long-term commitments to traditionally fleeting purchases.’
The co-opting of language around community, particularly when tied together with this sort of aesthetic narrative, feels a bit suspect—particularly after the past year and a half, in which systemic failings in the American social welfare safety net have been exacerbated, and largely only ameliorated through efforts of mutual aid, grassroots organising, and community-driven care. Anyway, this brings me to the reason why I thought of that Bloomberg article this week. It was because I read another, much more recent, piece by Eli Zeger for the Baffler called Working at the Faux-Op (subtitle: ‘Silicon Valley has caught wind of the benefits of collectivism’.
I mean, I got stress hives from that title alone. The Silicon Valley bros are at it again, what nefarious consumerist hijinks can possibly surprise me now? Enter something called Co-Op Commerce, which seeks to co-opt—see what I did there?—the recent trend of worker’s cooperatives emerging as equitable alternatives to large corporations. (An example of this: The Drivers Cooperative, a NY ride-sharing app owned by its drivers, of which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a fan.) Co-Op Commerce shares the same visual identity with these worker-driven initiatives, and one would be forgiven for assuming it’s one of them. There’s language and illustration intimating community baked into the website copy, even the minimal-chic logo and rainbow palette. But there’s a catch, Zeger writes:
‘Co-Op Commerce’s webpage displays a town square populated with dog walkers, joggers, and foodies “likely to convert”—to what? Perhaps to “The Co-op Way?” Might this refer to the startup’s ownership model? Not in the slightest. This faux-op of the future practices a watered-down form of selective collectivism geared towards small to midsize business owners and based on a commercialised version of mutual aid, building solidarity between brands and their owners, not their employees.
Backed by $1.6 million in pre-seed funding—from three different venture capital firms and the CEO of PopSugar—and having just closed a $5.8 million seed round, Co-Op Commerce’s purpose is to make it easier for businesses to partner, or cooperate, with each other, omitting that essential detail about shared ownership and governance. How does it work? Brands that join this faux-op can form advertising partnerships with other brands in the Collective based on the overlap of who’s “likely to convert” from one vendor to another. If you like Ghia, the nonalcoholic aperitif “inspired by the Mediterranean,” then you’ll love nibbling on PYM, the original “mood chew.’
Excuse me whilst my gag reflex kicks in at the phrase ‘commercialised version of mutual aid’. (How many mutually exclusive terms does it take to change a lightbulb—and by change a lightbulb I mean: render a radical concept entirely moot/ruined?) I don’t really have anything else pithy to say, except to quote the Internet at large: Thanks, I hate it!
As usual, I’m not sure how to wrap this newsletter up. As a privileged, liberal, highly-educated millennial with an affinity for Helvetica text and trendy yoga pants, I’m the ideal consumer archetype to fall for the siren call of the bland. And often I do, and I will continue to. I firmly believe, though, that as consumers (because that is inevitably what those of us who make up this hotly pursued demographic stronghold are) we have a responsibility to be conscious not just of the ethics of what products we buy but also to be conscious to how these products are marketed to us.
Being someone who functions in words and pictures—and who has been on both sides of the branding/marketing and consumer equation!—the importance of being media-literate to the visual identities we encounter feels increasingly paramount to me. The conversation becomes more than just: am I supporting businesses that are local, or small, or eco-friendly. It additionally becomes something more akin to a critical, semiotic analysis (or a reverse-engineered Don Draper moment): how is this brand trying to sell me? What are these aesthetics seeking to tell me about this brand’s values, and is this accurate?
I think that’s enough for today! It’s bedtime, so I’m gonna go do my nighttime skincare routine now, full of cleverly marketed serums by brands with pastel, sans-serif branding. Catch you on the flip side,
Maddy