You can’t pick up a marketing article without getting that feeling that the big ad agencies are just barely keeping up. That “blog-it-out” guy on the DirectTV ad is hilarious satire, until it hits you that they’d rather talk about themselves (even if it’s about “not getting it”) than listen to their market. We keep hearing the moan that advertising as we knew it is dead, that pumping a product has to make way for listening to consumers and being a part of their tribe. Make your product a brand in the constellation of choices that consumers use in constructing their identity. “Heck”, they say, “now it’s all ‘brand is so last year’”. Don’t create a brand, create a movement. Don’t piggy-back on a movement, be a movement.
Whatever the marketing cris de coeur is these days, one thing is certain: it still is – and always will be – about conspicuous consumption. The thing they need to tune into is that while people may still create their identity from consumer choices like Apple, Starbucks, Virgin and the rest, it’s no longer the products, and the brands they embody, that we are using as a badge to position ourselves; but positions and ideas themselves. We’re becoming our own cultural custodians and we’re becoming rather encyclopedic at it too.
How can something so innocuous as a wee magpie, or songbird or whatever it is be so annoying? It is absolutely everywhere, from tshirts to restaurant logos to etsy crafty goods to any vector-driven design that embraces the organic look (which can take it’s swirly leafy flourishes back too). The thing I don’t get is why that bird? Why not a deer, or a squirrel or a raccoon? Does that bird evoke some pseudo-serious literary or macabre pretensions?
