Doge

We meme'd the market; what's that mean for brands?

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One of the harshest brand criticisms today is to be called bland.

It’s not just that your logo or packaging is bad (at that vague a criticism, it’s simply subjective, really), it’s that it looks like everything else. It’s generic. And that’s bad.

“Blanding” as a term first surfaced in 2018 when Thierry Brunfaut of Base Design wrote an essay on the trend of “branding designed not to stand out at all, but to blend in."

Brunfaut wrote at the time: 

“In design, simplicity has historically been treasured. But simplicity, historically, has also carried an implication of cleverness. Or ingenuity. Or personality. Or all of those things. Simplicity was a compliment. But these days, companies are content with the simplicity part of simplicity, without any of the things that used to define it. And that’s not a compliment; it’s insulting to all of us.”

Which brings us to this week.

Forget how you feel about /r/wallstreetbets, Merlin Capital, or the viability of $GME or $AMC (or even Dogecoin, for that matter), and step back for a moment. What’s happening on Wall Street is a clear expression of our postmodernism: We’re turning stocks into memes and memes into currency.

And we’re celebrating it.

Consider: There’s little discussion about what this means about our trust in free markets, the viability of economic stability, or how a fundamental disruption of power structure alters our daily lives. The only thing anyone wants to know is: Are you in on this?

We’ve seen this at play in other arenas for years now, and that means blanding isn’t just a criticism, it’s a risky business decision. By choosing to blend in, brands are opting to ignore the most basic reaction we’re having right now: To throw the status quo into chaos.

While the argument for blanding is having the ability morph and meet the latest trend, a brand, by definition, is something that rebels against such quick changes.

As Brunfaut wrote in his original essay: “A brand is as much about what it isn’t as what it is”

This, oddly enough, aligns perfectly well with postmodernism and a new era of CPG brands.

Consider Fly By Jing, whose packaging states “This tastes different” and whose website reads “Not traditional, but personal” and Liquid Death, who promises its water will “Murder Your Thirst.”

Bootstrapped, Fly By Jing is part of the “new localism” trend, while Liquid Death, which has raised $34M, is part an “aesthetic innovation” trend, both aspects of what Mansur Gravriel CMO Ana Andjelic recently described as flex commerce:

“Flex commerce is a business and brand strategy that creates, delivers and captures social and cultural value of products and services and turns it into business value.”

Viewed through that lens, our increased inclination for embracing postmodernism and the practice of blanding run counter to each other. And that might be more dangerous now than ever before. Because, in that view, blands aren’t brands at all; they’re just products.