‘Spray Paint The Vegetables’ — What Makes a Brand Boring?

Caution: naughty words.

“In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey…”

The year is 1996. I am 12 years old. As a gullible and oblivious adolescent (pre-teens weren’t a thing yet) I was untroubled by wit or wisdom of any kind. I grew up in a small city of Palmerston North, New Zealand — famous for its… Dairy farming? Military base? Flat terrain? 

It was as boring as you could assume. Stupendously untroubled. The evidence? Might I point to exhibit A: it literally has a plaza in the centre of town called ‘The Square’. 

I remember approximately four things about 1996: Playstation, Friends (the TV show, obviously), mum’s brand new Sacramento State Green Mazda 323 and girls. Wait, there were five things.

I don’t know where you were when you heard ‘Loser’ for the first time — maybe you were cool enough back then and it wasn’t the first song that immediately came to mind when you thought of Beck. I was late to the party, but in 1996 when I tuned in to local radio gods Mike West and Baldrick on 92.2XSFM, he sounded like an alien that had fallen from the sky and started quasi-rapping the wildest shit imaginable.

“…Butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie
With the plastic eyeballs, spray-paint the vegetables
Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral
Stock car flamin' with a loser and the cruise control
Baby's in Reno with the vitamin D
Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love-seat”

I mean, what the hell is that supposed to mean? But for this 12-year old dolt, it was a revelation.

Nowadays, I like to picture Beck some time in 1993, furiously typing out the original lyrics — then suddenly a drunk Microsoft Paperclip pops up and just starts autocorrecting Beck, and Beck is like ‘Oh shit, that’s nice man.’

For anything else worth remembering that year, those lyrics were something I held onto. Not because they made any sense to me, they still don’t. But they were bloody interesting.

"Don’t be a bore." said the immortal David Ogilvy. “You cannot bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them into buying it.”

No disrespect to your dad, whoever that is. But you’ll never hear better fatherly advice than this.

The question is: how can you tell that you’re a monkey in a world full of chimpanzees? What makes bland brands boring? 

Most people, companies, organisations and countries fundamentally want to say the same things: ‘trust us’, ‘visit us’, ‘buy from us’ etc. The challenge is making these core messages as compelling as possible. Every brand has something fundamentally true to say which can be said in a thought-provoking way. And since it’s hard to narrow down what makes something interesting to all people, our best bet is to make everything as interesting as possible.

Brands are much more than the name or logo; it's the product, the history and the experience. Billions are spent creating and marketing them.

But as ‘things’, brands are intangible, abstract and often capricious. As people experience your brand, they collect different touchpoints and form a picture of it in their mind's eye. However, asking them to explain what your brand represents can be a bit like trying to draw a horse from memory. 

In these moments, being the first for their memory to recall is better than the alternative.

Brands are boring when they don't give their audience anything to care about.

Many boring brands are simply victims of poor positioning — either through laziness on the part of the designer or just skipped entirely through a false sense of urgency from the client. 

Good creative direction involves always having one eye on the zeitgeist and one eye on the ‘monkeys’ (the Beck metaphor, not the band) with a constant collection of ideas, experiences, thoughts and contradictions saved for later use. 

It’s a little thing called personal growth.

These experiences are added to relevant research which helps uncover tensions that arise in a brand’s positioning. Those who choose to skip the research component and dive headlong into the visual rollout risk missing vital insights that might set them apart from competitors. 

From experience, clients are usually happy to wear that risk — but by the time they realise that the visual identity doesn’t quite resonate, they have already invested so much financially and emotionally into it.

It becomes difficult to let go and start again.

A sharply defined personality will always claim a higher market share: bland brands either have a weak point of view, speak without any attitude or authority, have an unremarkable product offering or in the case of the examples below, possess all of the above.

Let me introduce you to the ‘Yawn Scale’.

First up: 

ECHT. 4 Yawns. 🥱🥱🥱🥱

No demonstrable ethos. No inspiration. No creative process. No defining brand iconography.

Echt describe themselves as “an innovative and on trend activewear apparel company specialising in affordable performance and leisure-based apparel.” Holy shit. Stick them in a cone, if they were any more vanilla they’d be an ice cream. 

One Reddit user describes their products saying “the defining feature is a printed (embroidered is a premium extra) logo placed on the left (or possibly right) side of the chest.”

That’s sure to make you stand out from the crowd at brunch. 

Booty, booty rockin’ everywhere — even eye candy can get repetitive.

Positioning is an exercise in relativity. It's about creating enough meaningful difference between yourself and the competition. If you're not creating differentiation, you're blending in.

The key is adjusting the tensions that your brand needs to be aware of. Think of it this way. Treat tensions the way you would treat a slider on a mixing board. There is a time to turn it up, and a time to turn it down, relative to the competition and what your audience is reacting to in the real world. 

Find a cheap overseas manufacturer, chuck on a logo (ad infinitum) and off you go — probably?

In this case, Instagram-friendly leisure apparel for the modern day athlete doesn’t seem to be up or down — it’s not obvious when Echt is speaking to the everyday person on their way to meet the girls for 9am mimosas, or when they are speaking to the amateur athlete on their way to crush a PB. The photography is stylised, but not in a way that supports these stories by way of education, inspiration or connection.

Perhaps they’re playing it safe, by being all things to all people at the same time.

They’re competing with the likes of Gym Shark, LSKD, Nike, Lorna Jane and Lulu Lemon. But at least these brands have defensible positions on certain social topics, having fun, provenance (where it’s made), methods of training etc. These are some of the undeclared reasons that people buy into when it comes to their favourite brands.

I get it, I’m probably not their audience. It may be edgy, but if skin tight scrunchy-crack tights and neck tattoos are something to plant a flag on, then god bless. There appears to be nothing meaningfully differentiated about this brand as yet.

Bondi Blue Vodka. 4.5 Yawns. 🥱🥱🥱🥱+ ½

A few quick facts you need to know about Bondi:

Bondi: Sydney’s most famous overcrowded, overpriced parking lot

Bondi: setting for the ostensibly whimsical reality television show ‘Bondi Rescue’

Bondi: home to 20,000 unemployed social media influencers (I’m estimating)

And finally, Bondi: the inspiration for ‘iconic’, unembellished and beloved Australian vodka brand, Bondi Blue.

Ok, we’re caught up on Bondi.

Look, I’m not saying they’re not successful. But Bondi Blue are just impressively nebulous. From packaging to website, it’s not immediately clear who they are, what they stand for or what they want from us. 

But in a way, I kind of understand the vagueness in their origin story. After all, what does vodka have to do with Bondi Beach or Australia in general? Absolutely nothing. 

Ambiguity is a stylistic trait found in postmodern art and design; it's when you look at a picture and see something different than what someone else sees. But is this abstraction intentional? Adding a bit of mystery to your brand story could be great if the payoff is worth it for the consumer. But it’s hard to tell. 

Bondi Blue heavily relies on its association with Bondi Beach, but fails to deliver a genuine connection. The borrowed visual references to Grey Goose only hint at a possible origin story; it feels unfinished. It feels boring.

Or maybe it’s the heavy use of blue. Blue is reasonably interpreted by most to be impersonal and conservative. If I want to remember a beverage brand, I want to remember it to be fun, fresh and surprising!

The value proposition “creating amazing memories with mates” is pretty low hanging fruit (I mean, who doesn’t want that) but also, who gets to decide whether this is the “Australian way of life”?

If the main thrust of the messaging is about fun with mates, what kind of fun? With who? How much fun? It feels like a missed opportunity to tells these interesting stories.

The About page is a shining example that of all the things one might cut from copy, the brand’s personality should be the last to go — that’s if you have a defensible brand personality or tone of voice to begin with.

It reads as if Chat GPT had one too many passionfruit sours, and tried to summon a random collection of words that resembled a brand ethos: “We Australian's are proud of the Vodka we have created, its incredibly smooth leaving you wanting more, Bondi Blue is Australia captured in a bottle made from pristine waters as pure as life itself.”

Wait,

Story checks out. Now I feel like I’m drinking a sad trombone sour.

A strong brand gives people a reason to keep buying from you even when they can’t quite remember why they started buying from you in the first place. That’s called being a monkey in a time of chimpanzees.

Resist the stale and if all else fails, just spray paint the vegetables.