The good, the flat and the ugly: designing brand experiences in the age of cultural flattening
“There is nothing new except the history you don’t know.”
Harry S Truman wasn’t talking about experiential marketing, but, boy oh boy, does it ring true now more than ever.
We, as marketers, talk endlessly about fragmentation and niche cultures, yet, in practice, cultural consciousness keeps collapsing into the same monocultural moments, echoing against the backdrop of that Jet2holidays sound until your ears bleed.
People talk about cultural flattening as if it’s a new creativity crisis, as if culture is dying because we’ve run out of originality. Culture isn’t disappearing; it’s being de-contextualised. And it’s that loss of context, the stripping away of depth, origin and meaning, that’s killing it right before our eyes.
Flattening isn’t about everything looking the same; it’s what happens when culture moves faster than the context that gives it shape. When symbols travel further than the stories behind them, depth, origin and meaning get stripped away, leaving only a smooth, lightweight version of what we once loved. In that sense, it is simply the loss of the history we no longer have time to know.
The 2010s were an era of streamlining, removing inconvenience and flooding us with unprecedented access, celebrity at your fingertips, vision into previously clandestine experiences. Scarcity replaced with abundance. But when nothing is hard to reach, nothing feels meaningful.
If we continue to subscribe to this notion, where will we end up? Algorithms driving us into no-brand’s land? Regurgitated nostalgic tropes that taste worse every time they’re dredged back up?