Beautiful monotony
Tash Walker
Founder The Mix, IPA 2017 women of tomorrow finalist, ex-Chairman The Marketing Academy Alumni, business leader, public speaker
“When you are in Sweden and you see beautiful person after beautiful person and you finally don’t even turn around to look because you know the next person you see will be just as beautiful as the one you didn’t bother to turn around to look at – in a place like that you can get so bored that when you see a person who’s not beautiful, they look very beautiful to you because they break the beautiful monotony.”
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Andy Warhol, Beauty, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975
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It’s true there are many ugly things in this world, but I don’t know if you feel it too, there are also many nice looking things too.
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In fact more and more, when I go to stores, to bars, and beauty counters, and coffee shops everything is very nice.
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Positively lovely you might say.
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The branding is all very slick. People write nice little stories about themselves and what they do. The packs all look like you could hang them in a picture frame, the people serving you have that look of the model about them, as though cake has not passed their lips in the last few months, or maybe ever.
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And I sometimes look at all this niceness and it gives me the ick.
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I was reading Andy Warhol this morning and it made sense to me.
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He describes the difference between beauty and talking.
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Beauty just is.
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Talking does.
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He described how uncomfortable beauty made him feel and how he loved to meet people who could talk. Talking people are doing something, going somewhere, beautiful people simple are beautiful.
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I kind of feel the same about brands.? Good looking brands abound but there are still few that I’m really that interested in.
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And of course most people aren’t interested at all in any of it.
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So designing things to be nice, at the expense of doing or saying anything really is a sure fire way to being a big nothing. Adam Morgan talks about this at EatBigFish when he talks about the Mephisto Waltz concept. ?This being the idea that over time, categories move close and closer together, like black holes until they eventually swallow each other up. This is very true of lots of DTC categories. Perhaps you wonder, there is a big design book of how to make something look nice and shiny on TikTok and lots of businesses seem to have used this.
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Well I’m bored. Bored of seeing cement grey cars everywhere. Bored of the beautifully minimal design on every skincare brand I’ve seen. Bored of the faux plants and industrial design furniture in every coffee shop, shared work space, interior store. Bored of 90’s retro on every t-shirt, and bored of the minimal sans serif typography of every luxury brand in existence.
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Give me some pimples and some grey hairs.
Some mad hat concoction that makes no sense whatsoever.
Something that feels totally unimaginable and therefore totally real.
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As Andy says “One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white.”
?Andy Warhol, Beauty, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975
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Harnessing the power of design and strategy to grow and connect brands with today’s consumer
9 个月I always love your articles ????
Insight Director
9 个月I wonder if the way we live in our ‘bubbles’ nowadays, the fact that the algorithm is feeding us what we’ve liked before, means we are just not being exposed to difference. It’s obviously out there. The political and economic situation in many countries demonstrates there are huge differences in views and experiences. But we only see and hear from people and brands that are more like us. It’s important for everyone to step out of the homogeneity of our lives. It’s a reason why brands need to get close to people and really understand them and their worlds.
Head of Marketing | Brand Strategy | Campaign Planning & Management
9 个月Beautifully written Tash x