August 27, 2005
commodities galore. commodities forever.
A word that rolls off my tongue a lot these days is “Commodity”.
Not surprising. We live in a era where China does the making, and Wal-Mart does the selling. In this game margins are wafer-thin, so for every hundred dollars of inventory you sell, you’ll be lucky to clear the price of a can of beer as profit. And next year you’ll be lucky to clear half a can of beer etc.
Because your shareholders want more than a few cans of beer in return for their investment, you’re going to have to sell a lot of stuff to keep them happy. Billions of dollars worth.
So to sell all these billions of dollars’ worth, you’re going to have a build a big company full of factories and cubicles and corner offices and meeting rooms and warehouses and fax machines and watercoolers and bad coffee, with legions of business-casual meatpuppets running around droning & number crunching.
It’s not pretty, but it’s what we got. Commodities galore. Commodities forever.
Luckily, some of these commodified meatpuppets earn lots of money. And as an antidote for all that commodification they’ve been doing during the week, during the weekends they’re going to want the exact opposite, and they’re willing to pay for it.
So they’ll spend their money on “non-commodity”, in other words, “Bespoke”. That could mean anything. Handmade suits or designer ice cream or yuppie furniture or wooden sailboats or Laura Ashley curtains or Tiffany necklaces. Anything that makes them feel special and unique. Anything to wash off the stink of the day job.
The more intense the WalMart-China commodification curve becomes, the more demand there will be for bepoke products i.e. the more intense the demand for an antidote will become.
And yeah, blogs are really good at selling bespoke. Which explains why, as a marketing blogger, I’ve gotten so interested in bespoke products, like $4000 suits or $10,000 jewelry.
It may also explain why I continue to live in a wee cottage in the English boonies, as opposed to doing what I always thought I’d do eventually i.e. move back to New York.
I love New York, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it’s a commodity town (just ask any over-thirty single person who lives there if you have any doubt). If I lived in New York, I’d have to go work for The Man again, just to pay the rent. I’d have to go play the commodity game again. Madison Avenue. Managing the Suicide Pact between Big Business and Big Media for fun and profit.
Sure, I could probably try my hand at being one of these “post-Cluetrain corporate guys who gets it”, but that wouldn’t last long. The boys with the red-hot pokers would find a way to come after me eventually, they always do (I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve been told that Steve Rubel no longer blogs during office hours. I’m guessing the red hot pokers have been out. Exactly.).
Don’t get me wrong. Some people do fine in with commodities. Some people hold down cool jobs at companies like Microsoft or General Motors. Some people can live quite comfortably on 0.00001% profit margins.
But most people I know aren’t like this. We weren’t made to emulate machines, sad but true.
So I believe the biggest issue my peers are facing at the moment is, how the hell do we free ourselves from the commodification of everything around us? How do we find our own version of “Bespoke”?
I guess this is why me, you and so many other people are blogging. Because if the answers aren’t in the blogosphere, where the hell are they?
We live in interesting times.
[REQUIRED READING:] “Small is the new big.”
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It used to be that quality of life (or better quality of life) was measured by how much stuff you had. Now everyone has all the stuff they could possibly need (and a huge debt driven by the belief that they are ENTITLED to everything) the only way to differentiate is to go bespoke. This in itself was a move forward from “knowing one’s place” and accepting that not everyone was going to achieve the same things and therefore they wouldn’t receive the same rewards, but I digress.
Therefore I have all the same stuff you do, but my stuff is unique and it fits me and my life better; therefore I am top of the heap (or my life is more worth living than yours, etc.). It’s sad that we have this desire for stuff and the associated sense of entitlement (which is quintessentially pointless and useless, doesn’t make us feel better and drives us to horribly baggaged existences), but we’ve gotten to such a point that society drives us all that way, so we may as well have BETTER.
The same applies to Bespoke suits, organic veg and farmer’s market meat — all normal things 150 years ago, but in the days of everything a luxury because everybody doesn’t have them. It’s a new sense of what is important and one that also ties into the sense of backlash that is building in some quarters.
It strikes me that the bespoke business will be less affected by anti-consumerist activities than a bigger conglomorate (the china/walmart) might be…
»»»»the biggest issue my peers are facing at the moment is, how the hell do we free ourselves from the commodification of everything around us? How do we find our own version of “Bespoke”?<
You are the marketing expert, but my guess is that the next step is time. Hobbies, for example. People who spend five days a week making money selling crap use that money to buy bespoke, right?
Some of those people think that they give five days of their week to stuff they don’t care much about and the other two to things they do care about. preferably, hobbies that require a lot of time and patience and have a very small competitive component, so that they can measure their expertise and get satisfaction from it without feeling too threatened.
The example that I know first hand is bellydance, which tends to attract two types of women: the ones that want to lose weight and professional ones from the sort of soulless competitive environment you describe. The ones that spend ten hours a day chained to a desk tend to be brilliant dancers because they treasure their daily hour of practice.
Classic silo-based (in this case marketing) thinking. Not heard of product lifecycle management, product development? Isn’t there an assumption there is no invention in this constrined model? Isn’t that part of Cluetrain/Hughtrain thinking? There’s nothing new here that hasn’t existed for 00’s of years. I wonder what the coffee and tea swillers of Old London Town thought in the 17th century…
Today, I read your post how to be creative. I know that you are CREATIVE. I am learning here. Thanks.
“Isn’t there an assumption there is no invention in this constrained model?“
Oh, there’s always room for invention, Dennis
But go to Walmart or ASDA and count how many brands on sale are responding to the ever-increasingly crowded shelfspace by making their brands more remarkable, versus the number of brands that are responding by just making short-term deals (i.e. making their stuff cheaper) or adding unremarkable line extensions i.e just adding more clutter.
Invention is great, but not all corporate cultures are geared up for it.
Small is the new Big
Read these: Small is the new big — Seth Godin Commodities galore. Commodities forever — Hugh Macleodb I work for a small dot com. We have 18 employees. The business brings in £1.8 m. It’s growing strongly. We pride ourselves…
Commoditize
Here’s a word: commodity Or, commoditized. As in, Cell phones have become fully commoditized. If you look it up, a commodity is an instrument of trade — usually a hard good, often agricultural, that’s sold or traded through futures contracts.
Web Diggings
Some great post from other blogs that are worth your reading time.. 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0…
Struggling with all of this myself, you couldn’t have written this at a better time for me. Bigger thinking, different angles and deeper caverns to consider.
Love your stuff and the insight it offers intellectually and while appealing to my need for laughter.