Marketing Unfiltered

As food loses flavour and political parties stray towards the divisive edges, why are brands still determined to dominate the generic middle?

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It started with crisps – Sizzling King Prawn McCoy’s and Nice ‘n’ Spicy Nik Naks to be specific.

Alongside the likes of Walkers Salt & Vinegar Squares, Smiths Salt n’ Vinegar Chipsticks and Pickled Onion Monster Munch, these were crisps with serious intent. They were designed to sting you with a powerful punch of flavour. Some of them even hurt (yes, Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard – my tastebuds are thinking of you. RIP).

 

But somewhere along the line, the UK’s capability to handle a challenging crisp softened. Take the Nik Naks – I grabbed a bag of Nice ‘n’ Spicy in my local CO-OP yesterday as a road snack to nibble around the aisles (don’t judge me - you all do it). For international readers unaware of a Nik Nak, they’re small, crunchy crisps shaped like something halfway between a map of Japan and a sperm. The Spicy ones were traditionally tangy enough to make you wince dramatically, as if you’d sucked on a lemon or accidentally signed off a Zoom call ‘Love you, too’. 

 

Yesterday, however – I tasted… nothing. A vague whiff of what once was. A bland, generic vacuum of flavour. They were dull, boring - neither Nik nor Nak, nice nor spicy in any way whatsoever - and it made me sad. As for McCoy’s Prawn Cocktail? I’d bet the house that the team that designed those has never, not once, been in the same post code as an actual prawn.

 

Many foods have gone this way into the comfortable flavour-free middle, some by design and some by the essence of their production processes, because it seems to serve them well, commercially at least:-

 

· Pret a Manger sandwiches - Hugely popular, they all taste of exactly the same thing, being nothing at all  

 

· Tomatoes – from your garden? Sweet and delicious. From a shop? Cold water

 

· Bread – Artisanal bakery? Fluffy, rich, salty goodness. From Tesco? Floor tile

 

· Pork – from a pig in a field? Good. From M&S? Pig’s dinner

 

· Budweiser. 😬

 

In Politics, the world – or leading political movements within it – have gone the other way, pushing out towards the boundaries on both the left and the right, leaving a chasm of normalcy in the empty middle where most sentient humans would, if they were honest, likely park their vote. In the UK we have the Corbinesque hard left making noise as the absurd Reform right frog march their way into popular opinion.

 

The US, as with so many things, has done the same but on a Las Vegas stag weekend level of extremes, with the right agenda fluffed by bankroller in chief Elon Musk, for whom a mountain top headquarters called something like ‘Eagle’s Nest’ is becoming increasingly easy to visualise.  

 

So products are going beige, and politics is going batshit – where does that leave brands?

Well, sadly brand design is taking part in a race to the middle as well, in which the use of Serif fonts means you’ll be sneered at as if you just plugged your Beats headphones to a wireless and cranked up Tchaikovsky’s greatest hits on the Tube. Sans-Serif is hailed as some kind of simpleton saviour over the differentiated logos of old, and as a result, brand logos look like they were pumped out in Powerpoint with minimal regard for differentiation.

 

 

 

 

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Image credit:- VelvetShark.com

 

This movement has acquired the rather fun umbrella term ‘Blanding’ – whereby brands homogenise until there’s little if any of their original design identity (or emotional value) remaining.

 

Speaking at the D&AD ‘Beyond Sans Serif’ Panel in April 2023, Nadine Chahine, CEO of I Love Typography said:- “There’s a lot of [visual] variation at startup stage, but more recently they’ve been homogenised into a very similar look”.

 

What is a brand’s job? I’ve said it ‘til I’m blue in the face – brands and the campaigns supporting them exist to achieve attributable fame, off the back of which a myriad of funnels can eventuate, flowing down towards sales and, god willing, a plethora of returning customers.

With this kind of safe play around brand design, you offend nobody but neither do you delight anybody – and unless you’d achieved the brand fame before hand, nothing new or dramatic will happen as a result of a generic brand.

 

As far as I can tell, this homogenisation relates, at least in part, to globalisation and the desire to keep things clean and simple under the auspices of contemporary design vogue, but equally this is about playing safe. All the brands above would make shit loads in revenue no matter what they look like, but by veering towards the safe middle those in charge don’t risk alienating anybody outside the coven of their global brand peers who all look exactly the same.

It’s not so much about aiming for the sun and risking an Icarus style burnout. It’s more about

avoiding failure, on both a brand and personal level, at all costs.  

 

As Shaun Loftman, ECD at Landor & Fitch said on the same D&AD Panel:-

“Someone will wake up one day and realise we all look the same, especially if it’s the right company … it’ll make a massive ripple. For instance if Coca-Cola or Apple does that sort of shift, they will become the new standard-bearers.”

 

In this mushroom coloured sinkhole of mediocrity, is anyone brave enough to put their brand above the parapet? Well, yes – and they’re thriving as a result.

 

In FMCG, Liquid death stands out. Their packaging looks like it was crafted by a miffed designer moments after they’d ingested the entire product portfolio intravenously. The brand personality and tone of voice don’t appear to give a shit, morphing into some pretty dank places at times. In a world crowded with ‘children are the future’ tweeness, having a strapline that suggests you ‘Murder Your Thirst’ can’t help but stand out like a broken thumb.

 

In tech, Microsoft, Oracle and the other giants have trademarked blanding and made it an artform, with brand design that looks like elevator music sounds. Luckily, the likes of Figma, with their vibrant, freestyle aesthetic and Duck Duck Go with their old school duck overlaid on a heavy ‘privacy at all costs’ positioning make them shine like beacons of originality. It doesn’t even look that hard – they just needed to be decisively different and do something – anything – to avoid looking like a tester pack for a new fungal infection cream.

 

Somewhere in this beige brand ecosystem is a massive opportunity for new upstart brands to come out in their technicolour dreamcoats, shouting ‘new and exciting’ from the rooftops as they make every other brand in their vertical stand out as the boring wall-sitters they’ve become. 

 

Harry Lang is a marketing consultant, CMO and author of ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon.