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.

Maybe we’ve always “self-branded” ourselves deeper than our hybrids or Sevens (think of the books you display, or the iPod playlist you want to share) but never before have we been able to participate in and proliferate them at such a mini-Madison Avenue pace. Today’s technology and blogosphere have spawned such wildly successful aggregators of taste and lifestyle as Stuff White People Like (never mind the imitators) and A Very Short List (who both parlayed clicks into ad dollars and lucrative book deals) and the mainstream media is also in on the lingo. Witness New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix (not to mention their unabashedly populist bloggy website itself) or the NYT’s Sunday Styles obsession with hip urban lifestyle “stories” that eschew analysis for simply cataloguing lifestyle rituals. It turns out even Toronto (previously known as the most multicultural and least cosmopolitan city) has attracted the “Bohemian Index”-er himself, Richard Florida to set up shop – and a blog on the globeandmail.com.

Even easier still when our media create little primers and lists for us. A Field Guide to a Cooler You.

I remember studying subcultures and the fascination with the “homology” holding together all their self-created signifiers into an ethos. But these were all in rejection of mainstream culture - before the bourgeois were bo-bo. This has a lot to do with the emergence of a new creative class - knowledge, fashion and tech workers who create and eat their own products faster than Teamster Joe could buy a Ford in the ’50s. Today it’s never been easier to “get it” when identity is less about lived experiences and getting your hands dirty, and more about consuming a lifestyle. Even easier still when our media create little primers and lists for us. A Field Guide to a Cooler You. So come on everybody, it’s not that hard, get down and get with it!

Posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 9:17 am Under DESIGN & CULTURE. You can trackback from your own site.