Grant McCracken has a fascinating riff on contemporary fashion that's highly relevant for other aspects of marketing and design. Starting with a discussion of the "haute couture meets thrift shop" costume design for the hit show Desperate Housewives, Grant launches into a deeper analysis of the mixing phenomenon:
[W]hy is it suddenly ok to wear things that were purchased on the cheap?(We know some of the factors here: better quality at the low end, and better design as well.)
There may be a deeper motive. I wonder if people are not mixing for cultural reasons as well as economic ones. It’s possible that we are looking at a new strategy of message construction and self presentation.
We know, thanks to Diderot, that there was a Western convention that says that everything in a consumer’s choice set (syntagmatic chain) must come from the same place in the paradigmatic category. Everything, coat, shirt, pants, must be of roughly equal quality, cost, formality and style. You couldn’t mix without looking odd.
But something happened. I think highly redundant cultural creations are not precisely that. When we wear an outfit all from Ralph Lauren, it’s a little like we are telling the same joke over and over again. It’s as if we are repeating ourselves in the most tedious way.
...We are now pretty good readers of the codes of a consumer culture. We don’t need lots of repetition to get it. The use of “genre” to construct looks can let up a little. We have permission to move away from highly redundant codes. But there is another motive. When we mix the message, we become more interesting to look upon. We become more vivid. We become actual.
This is a great start at explaining the almost hallocinogenic richness of current personal styles, which you can see on almost every street corner. But does this trend transcend individuals? Will we see mixed-up corporate identities? Are we already?
Most discussions of branding and marketing have emphasized the importance of consistency and repetition. (In a tangential way, I talked about some of the dangers of inconsistency in this post on political blogging and ethics.)
But organizations whose look is too homogenous may be "telling the same joke over and over again." I think you need to differentiate between those instances when it's important to be vivid and stand out, and others when it's important to be consistent and reassuring.
