Tacos and T-shirts: How Trends Converge

Useful marketing insights don’t always require discovery by means of expensive market research. Sometimes just a thoughtful review of first-hand observations made over the course of a long lifetime can provide them as well.

Consider fundamentals, like “food, clothing, and shelter” — these are usually the first market categories cited as consumers’ “basic needs.” A longer-range analysis of the trends in these markets reveal common patterns. These patterns in turn reflect more than just macroeconomic forces. They are clearly driven by changing patterns in societal values, values that influence buying behavior across all kinds of products and services.

Take tacos and t-shirts. What do they have in common?

First, let’s deconstruct tacos — or more generally, foods favored by most Americans. To keep it simple, let’s just look at “eating out” behavior. While out-of-home dining accounts for less than a quarter of American meal occasions, the macro-trends in this channel can be more readily and freely observed.

Over the past century, restaurant fare has shown two noteworthy counter-trends. The first trend has been to uniformity and homogenization, as chain establishments and their franchised subordinates spread the practices of mass manufacturing into kitchens governed by uniform standards and recipes nationwide. Local greasy spoons and soda fountains? Clearly on the way out. Hello, White Castle, and its many successors.

The very pressure to conformity, when powered by increased prosperity, seems to have provoked a counter-trend (pun intended), an appetite for diversity. A century ago, popular “foreign food” restaurants usually served only three ethnic cuisines: "Chinese" (and then only Cantonese style), "Italian" (not including pizza, which didn’t become widely available until after World War II), and "French" (exclusively “for gourmets only” as a pricey white table cloth exotic). Today? Check Yelp for the wide selection of ethnic cuisines available at restaurants near you. What? No Ethiopian? For shame!

There’s two other evident macro-trends: one pits creativity against conserving tradition. It’s noteworthy that many establishments, especially those on the “high end” of the price scale, rely on time-tested, unchanging “classics” for their signature dishes and drinks: from burgers to steaks, to fine wines from ancient estates and Caesar salads, etc. But now a muscular American cuisine has won world-wide recognition, with many domestic restaurants recognized by Michelin as first-class contenders, thanks to the creative flair of their fare.

Another trend reflects the inversion of social class influences. It's driven by cultural and macroeconomic changes, such as the time-pressure-driven need for convenience, recently declining middle class incomes, mass immigration, even pressures favoring political correctness. A century ago, social classes looked upward, imitating “their betters” in terms of their appetites and preferences. Today, class emulation works in reverse: down-scaling is cool. The French have long sneered at this temptation, calling it "nostalgie de la boue" — "a yearning for the mud."

Working class men of yore ate their lunches out of a paper bag, or purchased food from the “roach coach” in the factory parking lot, or ate at the company cafeteria if they were more fortunate. Today, down-scale has moved up: “food trucks” are fashionably diverse in their signature items and cuisine offerings. “Street food” (bagged or not) is the popular fashion, chain restaurants cater both upscale and down, and the soul foods that we felt gave us comfort as children are the hot new fare at "fast casual" restaurants everywhere. Tradition has married down-scale diversity, fostering a creative explosion: now we have places charging premium prices for waffles that hold sandwiches, or upscale, custom-topped doughnut shops, or buffalo wing joints everywhere, or custom-hand-blended ice cream parlors, or fancy coffee concoctions, and more.

So let's return to tacos. They started out being peasant food, ethnic sandwich equivalents brought to American cities by Latin American immigrants. Like pizza, they've now become as "American" as good old apple pie (which was actually a British concoction). Hence, tacos’ rise reflects down-scaling, diversity, economy, and easily produced hand-held convenience. Plus creativity: innovators are now mutating the humble taco into a wildly creative series of innovations.

T-shirts? Same thing. Almost no-one can afford to wear couture, or custom-made, or tailor-made clothing any more. Fewer and fewer men need to wear suits to work, let alone ties. Fast-casual and sports wear is no longer restricted to “casual Fridays.” Half a century ago, Don Johnson’s appearance in Miami Vice made wearing a T-shirt under a sports coat a fashionable new look for men. Now the sports coat is dispensable, and even pajamas have begun to make an appearance as “street clothes.” As for diversity, you can now readily order a reasonably priced T-shirt that has been imprinted with your own custom design, from any number of resources online.

Even housing reflects these same trends. From the last century's lust for “MacMansions,” we now see enthusiasts looking for the most innovative arrangements in “tiny houses.” Cheaper, down-scale, ideally street mobile, diverse, etc.

How long before these same influences become apparent in the markets for transportation and entertainment as well? But wait: they already have: down from limos to Town Cars to pickup trucks and Uber, from thousand channel cable TV to Netflix and Tivo, from symphony orchestra concerts to rock concerts to bootlegged hip hop MP3s and more.

What changes have these trends and influences already wrought in the markets you toil in? What do these influences portend for the future? More of the same (“normalcy bias”) or “black swan” lurches to radically new solutions? Only more time will tell.