Hype crazes
I’ve been looking at cases where marketing hype has managed to create a craze for an at-best mediocre product. This is not to suggest that advertising is predatory; on the contrary, I think it provides a necessary service by providing information and allowing people to make choices.
In the everyday business of buying clothes, food and drink, travel, luxury goods and grooming, I think it informs us of the availability of certain brands and the advantages to be gained by buying them. But there are some cases where advertising and cultural hype can create a kind of epistemic bubble where social conformity substitutes for quality judgement. Promoters sometimes draw on FOMO, the fear of missing out, to herd people into products of limited value to them.
Cronut fever in 2013 generated multi-hour queues for what was essentially a novelty pastry, the combination of a croissant and a doughnut; competent, but nowhere near justifying the frenzy. A cronut exceeded your daily saturated fat and sugar allowance in one go.
Pumpkin spice became a marketing juggernaut that migrated into products such as candles, dog treats, and lip balm, with no plausible connection to quality. Crystal Pepsi was hyped as futuristic and health-adjacent, when removing the caramel colouring made it taste noticeably worse for most people, not better.
The Segway was famously pre-launched by its inventor Dean Kamen as something that would change cities more than the automobile. Codenamed ‘ginger,’ it attracted high profile investors, but its fate was to become a tourist attraction and police vehicle.
Google Glass launched to breathless coverage about revolutionary wearable computing; it was uncomfortable, socially off-putting, and solved no clear problem. People didn’t like the idea of being filmed without their awareness or consent.
The Blair Witch Project of 1999 saw an extremely clever marketing campaign built around authentic-seeming footage, which made a very low-budget film feel like an event. The film itself divided audiences sharply. Cloverfield used similar mystery-box marketing. Snakes on a Plane was virally hyped on social media to generate a must-see vibe for what was an ordinary mild horror movie.
Levis 501s, reverted to brass buttons in place of the more useful and neater zip fasteners, persuading customers that it was more ‘heritage.’ This would be akin to a quality wine maker reverting to the ‘heritage’ Blue Nun that we moved on from years ago.
Labubu dolls to affix to handbags of rucksacks have become must-have accessories, with some fetching absurd prices. Clever hype has made them more of a statement than a fashion treasure.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from this, it is a simple one. Ask yourself, ‘Do I really need this, or am I being manipulated into thinking that I do?’
Madsen Pirie