informal manifesto: part 2 — Branding and Media
The informal manifesto traces back the origins of the decline of retail spaces and proposes a new way forward by reintroducing informality to shopping. It drafts the intellectual framework underpinning Informal Retail, a startup which installs retail embedded within existing local businesses and stocks them with a rotating selection of brands.
2. second wave: branding and media
The Coca-Cola pin-ups turned a sugary drink into a lifestyle product. Its simple, clear imagery with the term “enjoy” was enough to grab one’s attention and seduce its audience. The strategy was bold, and set the tone for the discourse around their product. Those were also simpler times where channels of advertising were restricted to billboards, print ads, and radio. As the industry scaled and the advertisement landscape became increasingly competitive, the role of the creative director soon became secondary to that of marketers. With the arrival of focus groups, market research, and more formalized marketing teams, products and communication started being tailored to demand as opposed to creating demand.
This was in stark contrast with the innovative thinking that spurred these new economies. “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse” Ford famously said. Yet the race for customer visibility permeated every new medium and quickly became self-referential. New formulas were created — the 30 second TV spot, the page in the glossies. Again, the optimized effort for standing out resulted in an aspiration for formality, in the creation of meaningless contexts, devoid of authenticity, vision, or message.
Overlaid to shopping environments which were increasingly standardized as well, this resulted in a gradual loss of magic. The by now all too familiar aisles were filled with predictable products and unimaginative, repetitive and misleading imagery and taglines. Confusion ensued. “Be yourself” would state ads promoting mass market items. This current reached unimaginable proportions with the arrival of social media, in which each individual now promotes a personal brand of their own — usually emulating influencers, themselves shaped by trends and marketing efforts. When the feedback loop between individual expression and commercial messaging becomes so short that they’re indecipherable from each other, the uniformity and meaninglessness that results forms a second wave of formality to wash across the world of shopping.
Stay tuned for the following installment!
