Don't Hate The Players, Hate The Game

Youthforia, Apple, and Patagonia walk into a bar...

The month started out with the Youthforia controversy that reeked of fast beauty hyperconsumerism. Shortly thereafter, we all had to process Apple’s soul-crushing iPad campaign that painted a dystopian picture of our near future. Then late last week, with barely a glimmer of hope for humanity, I stumbled across Patagonia’s Shitthropocene, a must-watch satirical film about how everything is going to shit and we’re all fucked. Their words, not mine. 

Needless to say, I have been feeling a little ick and wondering wtf is wrong with us.  

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

Both Youthforia and Apple made some serious mistakes with their execution. And both brands were met with backlash of epic proportions. Apple will shake it off. Youthforia may not survive. I’m not interested in criticizing the founder, product development teams or creative teams. I’m more interested in understanding how the 2nd largest company in the world and a hot indie brand on the rise were both caught in a similar cultural maelstrom.

On the surface, the critical mistake both brands made was overlooking their target customers.

If Youthforia had taken the time to understand their target audience, the foundation would have been tested on many, many melanated models during the product development phase, and it would have been formulated with undertones that offered nuance. Instead, the company raced to market with an unwearable product.  

If Apple had run focus groups before releasing their spirit-slaying ad, they would have realized that their intended audience - artists, musicians and creators - feel deeply connected to their tools and instruments, and that seeing them literally smashed and destroyed by an industrial crusher is not inspiring. And it’s hardly a metaphor. We’re standing at a historical precipice, when generative AI threatens to crush human creativity more than it stands to empower it. This campaign stoked the fears that lie dormant in so many of us while also offending the artists and creatives that made the brand what it is today. It felt as though Apple created this campaign in a vacuum, disconnected from their customers’ emotional reality.

These two companies weren’t thinking about their target customers. So, what were they thinking? And who were they really creating for? I believe both were caught in the soulless loop of hyperconsumerism that is driven by three forces: Lead, Speed, and Greed. 

A Soulless Loop

We’re wired to consume. Consumption, to a certain extent, ensures our survival. But, the vast majority of us consume far more than we need, yet we never seem to get full. Why? Shitthropocene summarizes it well: capitalism drives competition, which drives consumerism, which drives advertising, which perpetuates an soulless loop of desire and discontent.

“The advertising apparatus tells us we can transform our lives for the better by buying more stuff”, yet the more we buy, the more we think we need to maintain status, which is a relative standing judged against fickle cultural benchmarks such as beauty, the latest technology, and other of-the-moment material things. This cycle is the very definition of hyperconsumerism, and it’s driven by three seductive forces.

Lead

Capitalism drives competition, and in any competition, someone is always in the lead. For an established brand like Apple, they fight to maintain their place as a market leader. For a challenger brand like Youthforia, they are in a fight to gain market share. Newness is relevance, relevance is revenue, revenue wins the race.  

Speed

In today’s culture, newness can’t come fast enough. We’ve never seen such rapid trend cycles, such constant content cycles, and such bloated NPD pipelines. It’s crazy the amount of products that are launching, and even though there are many experts warning us that this pace is unsustainable and unnecessary, beauty, fashion and tech industries are not slowing down. Companies speed to stay in the lead, or gain traction. But this is shortsighted, as speed to market often undermines ingenuity, creativity, quality, longevity and deep emotional resonance.

Greed

There’s a looming question around who is really driving hyperconsumerism. Research would suggest that it’s not the consumers, who report feeling overwhelmed by choice. In my experience, it’s not the founders either, most of whom want to create only what their customers need and truly love, without contributing to waste. On the other hand, retailers live or die by newness. In a TikTok video posted by Youthforia Founder, Fiona Co Chan, she and her husband publicly shared a common founder concern: due to fear of being “kicked out” of Ulta, they fast-tracked product development on their new foundation shades, squeezing a two-year process into four months. She half-joked that messing this up could bankrupt the company before adding that she was pregnant. Odd timing for that announcement, I think, but anyway.

Similarly, investors live or die by their time horizons. In a recent Glossy article, an unidentified founder said this:

“Investors and a brand’s board of directors hold so much influence — they can dictate your entire product strategy. From my experience, the hold period in the beauty investment space is less than five years, which means that if you take on funding, you have to plan an exit within that time frame. So, I think that kind of trickles down to what the customer sees in the market, right? A bunch of products they don’t need or even want.”

We all have to make money. The question is how much is enough, and what is at stake?    

A Conscious Loop

Nobody wants to talk about hyperconsumerism because it’s the air we breathe. It is a pervasive force so deeply embedded in our culture, it’s almost impossible to see. It’s simply everywhere.

While Shitthropocene revealed the ugly side of hyperconsumerism, it also offered its antidote. By way of a case study on their waders, they portrayed an intentional, ethical, customer-centric approach to sourcing, product development, field testing, consumer testing and go-to-market that ultimately took more time and money, but led to a far superior product that generated far less waste and engendered deep brand loyalty. Their commitment to quality is the air they breathe. It’s so embedded in their culture, it’s simply everywhere.

Patagonia has broken the cycle of hyperconsumerism. Unmotivated by being in the lead, by speed or by greed, they have nonetheless cultivated deep brand loyalty among a devoted following and have steadily grown into an exemplar of conscious capitalism. Their biggest flex is that they have taken their time to build an enduring brand, which requires a different kind of loop:

Clear core values that drive deep customer research that leads to fresh market insights that inspires innovation and ensures superior product quality. 

Patagonia is proof that there’s an alternative. I look forward to the day when we can point to at least one other major corporation as a successful example of conscious capitalism in action.