These Shoes are Made for Walking
Putting on my new Muji shoes this morning got me to thinking further about the concept of shibui, which is as much about a sense of "perfect ordinariness" as it is about unobtrusive beauty. You have to go back to Plato's Cave to see where I'm going with this, but my thought is that products that are designed in the spirit of shibui also are as close to the ideal representation of a product as you are going to see.
If a trend of post-materialistic austerity were to catch on, it does bring up some interesting possibilities from the perspective of branding and marketing. Luxury and fashion certainly are not eponymous, yet the last 20 years ago has definitely seen the two go hand-in-hand. The ultimate expression would be t-shirts branded with a designer's logo or name; at the end of the day, they're really just utterly ridiculous, completely overpriced t-shirts that probably aren't even as good in quality as what you could buy at Target from Hanes for $7.99 retail. Considering the dour mood of the economy right now, the market for those kinds of superfluous "luxury" goods could easily dry up, especially if American consumers follow their European, Korean and Japanese counterparts by focusing once again on the idea of saving over spending. Being judicious with money, however, doesn't mean that people would want to give up style--it just means that you would need to divorce the idea of fashion from luxury.
Should that happen, there could be an increasing opportunity for brands that have cultivated a reputation for offering solid quality and excellent frugality with just a dash of style to really begin gaining customers across the economic spectrum. Quality is a key component of this, because the idea of "throw-away" goods flies directly in the face of consumers trying to economize. That's part of the reason, I suspect, that IKEA has recently begun improving the quality of its merchandise.
Among other brands, the aforementioned Target has certainly done this, and should only continue to grow once the downturn begins to slow. Other companies also offering that "solid work ethic" would include JetBlue and Hyundai. Hyundai has already been advertising its Genesis using the rationalization that, in a post-materialistic structure, a car that offers all the features of a typical luxury sedan--minus the $20,000 surcharge of the luxury badge--makes perfect sense. If it were me in charge of the ad campaigns, I'd go one step further to make that claim explicit instead of implicit, and would then figure out how to extend that messaging into every other vehicle in the portfolio down to the Elantra; unfortunately, I have not quite yet grasped how to turn my PR career into a marketing one, and therein lies the problem. Perhaps I'll take a walk to further break-in those new shoes, and think about the solution to that next.
If a trend of post-materialistic austerity were to catch on, it does bring up some interesting possibilities from the perspective of branding and marketing. Luxury and fashion certainly are not eponymous, yet the last 20 years ago has definitely seen the two go hand-in-hand. The ultimate expression would be t-shirts branded with a designer's logo or name; at the end of the day, they're really just utterly ridiculous, completely overpriced t-shirts that probably aren't even as good in quality as what you could buy at Target from Hanes for $7.99 retail. Considering the dour mood of the economy right now, the market for those kinds of superfluous "luxury" goods could easily dry up, especially if American consumers follow their European, Korean and Japanese counterparts by focusing once again on the idea of saving over spending. Being judicious with money, however, doesn't mean that people would want to give up style--it just means that you would need to divorce the idea of fashion from luxury.
Should that happen, there could be an increasing opportunity for brands that have cultivated a reputation for offering solid quality and excellent frugality with just a dash of style to really begin gaining customers across the economic spectrum. Quality is a key component of this, because the idea of "throw-away" goods flies directly in the face of consumers trying to economize. That's part of the reason, I suspect, that IKEA has recently begun improving the quality of its merchandise.
Among other brands, the aforementioned Target has certainly done this, and should only continue to grow once the downturn begins to slow. Other companies also offering that "solid work ethic" would include JetBlue and Hyundai. Hyundai has already been advertising its Genesis using the rationalization that, in a post-materialistic structure, a car that offers all the features of a typical luxury sedan--minus the $20,000 surcharge of the luxury badge--makes perfect sense. If it were me in charge of the ad campaigns, I'd go one step further to make that claim explicit instead of implicit, and would then figure out how to extend that messaging into every other vehicle in the portfolio down to the Elantra; unfortunately, I have not quite yet grasped how to turn my PR career into a marketing one, and therein lies the problem. Perhaps I'll take a walk to further break-in those new shoes, and think about the solution to that next.