The frantic quest for the Next Big Thing

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 17.)

Ever get the feeling the consumerist society is getting just a bit out of hand?

I certainly do. For the status-conscious, life seems to be an endless, frantic quest for the Next Big Thing.

Allow me to give you an example. A year or so ago a New York bakery started selling something called the cronut, so named because it’s a cross between a croissant and a donut. People queued for five hours to buy them.

Inevitably the cronut craze quickly spread to New Zealand. We like to be up with the play on such things.

They weren’t cheap but they flew out the door. Everyone wanted them. Suppliers couldn’t keep up with the demand.

In foodie circles, admitting you hadn’t tried a cronut – or worse still, didn’t even know there was such a thing – was tantamount to revealing you had a paedophile in the family.

Having scoffed a few cronuts myself, I can confirm that they are indeed wickedly desirable. But here’s the thing: I haven’t seen a cronut in months, or even heard them mentioned.

Cronuts, it seems, are just so last year. Exciting new diversions, such as Lewis Road Creamery Fresh Chocolate Milk, have elbowed them out of the way.

As for cronuts, so for the Lewis Road product. The Waikato dairy factory that made it (which is not, as far as I can ascertain, in Lewis Road) couldn’t keep up with the demand when the product was launched.

Wellington’s temple of gastronomy, Moore Wilson, had to ration it: one bottle per customer. On Trade Me, 750ml bottles – retail price $6.29 – were selling for up to $26.

Supermarkets had to put out signs advising when stocks had run out. Anguished shoppers who missed out were dousing themselves with petrol and setting themselves alight in New World car parks. (All right, that’s a slight exaggeration.)

As with cronuts, though, the Lewis Road chocolate milk frenzy quickly subsided. You could probably stroll into your local Countdown this morning and fill your trolley with the stuff.

Better still, you could try making your own at home. It was just chocolate milk, after all.

So what made this particular brand so desirable that everyone simply had to have it? I’ve never tasted it, but logic and experience tells me it can’t have been that sensational.

As advertising people know, creating demand for a product is often about selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Words like “creamery” and “fresh” seem irresistible in a world obsessed with naturalness and authenticity. And it’s surely no coincidence that Peter Cullinane, the man behind Lewis Road, is a former worldwide boss of Saatchi and Saatchi.

Clever advertising (and I suspect social media was a key tool in this instance) can build an aura of mystique around a brand. The same happened with the New Zealand vodka 42 Below, which made a multi-millionaire of another former ad man, Geoff Ross.

I’m not suggesting Cullinane’s and Ross’s products were not good to start with, but their success was about much more than quality. It was about creating a sense of desirability and exclusivity.

The marketing campaign for Lewis Road didn’t just tap into a hedonistic society’s hunger for new sensory experiences. More subtly, it exploited that peculiar form of social anxiety known as FOMO, or fear of missing out.

Psychologists define this as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Status-conscious people can’t bear the thought of being excluded from something new and exciting. 

You see this same phenomenon played out when a trendy new restaurant opens. It’s typically swamped by fashion-conscious foodies … that is, until another trendy new restaurant opens. Then they move on, like so many reef fish.

There are innumerable other examples of our cultish obsession with newness.  In the 1990s we were captivated by wine, in the noughties it was coffee, now it’s craft beer.

Our forebears, who fretted about being able to put food on the table and having enough warm clothing to survive the winter, would find it very puzzling. They would call us an effete society, if they knew the word existed.

And what does it all amount to? Ultimately, the longevity of any brand relies on much more than novelty. In the long run it’s consistent, dependable quality that counts.

The women’s fashion business is hilariously capricious, yet the little black dress, created by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, endures virtually unchanged. Will we be queuing for cronuts and Lewis Road chocolate milk in 90 years? Somehow I doubt it.

A Daihatsu society with BMW pretensions

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, September 28.)

SEAN Plunket wrote a thoughtful column in this paper last Saturday in which he contrasted the media coverage given to two events in Auckland: one a conference on offshore petroleum prospects, the other the annual Fashion Week extravaganza.

One event was about New Zealand’s economic future. The other was about frippery, goody bags and celebrities most of us have never heard of. Guess which event got more attention.

There is a much bigger issue here. The New Zealand economy is a crock. We haven’t paid our own way in the world – by that I mean earned more than we spent – since 1973. Our leaders talk optimistically about catching up with other OECD countries, notably Australia, but we’re steadily slipping further behind. Yet we continue to live as if in a fantasy world where we can afford to pamper ourselves with every self-indulgent excess that the consumerist economy dangles in front of us.

We consider it our right to enjoy a standard of living that our parents would never have dared dream of (even though, paradoxically, the country was far more wealthy in their time than it is now). We want to dine in the trendiest restaurants, drink the finest wines, holiday in the most exotic locations and live in the most lavish homes, but we don't want to vex ourselves wondering whether the economy is prosperous enough to sustain this lifestyle.

A whole new genre of “aspirational” magazines fosters a sense of entitlement. These glossies, along with a slew of hedonistic TV shows, are devoted to the proposition that we should imagine ourselves driving the finest European cars, living in houses created by the most fashionable architects and wearing whatever designer-label clothes are currently deemed de rigueur.

We have even created our own faux celebrity culture to promote the idea that we are sophisticated, cosmopolitan, racy and prosperous. Auckland’s Viaduct Basin is our pathetic little pretend Riviera, where frou-frou types guzzle Moët (though they can’t pronounce it) and jostle to get their pictures taken for the social pages.

Problem is, our wheezing economy cannot sustain such delusions. We are a Daihatsu society with BMW pretensions.

The ancient Romans had a phrase for all this: panem et circenses, or bread and circuses – the buying-off of the populace with showy distractions to keep their minds off more important matters. The difference is that in modern New Zealand, we don’t wait for our leaders to supply the bread and circuses. We do it ourselves.

* * *

HOW SAD that the New Zealand Federation of Islamic Associations is insisting on an apology from Building Minister Maurice Williamson for his after-dinner joke about Muslims and stoning.

It’s plain that no harm was meant. That should be the sole test of whether Mr Williamson should apologise.

But there’s more to it than that. Many Muslim immigrants come from repressive, authoritarian states, and it seems reasonable to assume that one of the factors that attracts them here is our reputation as a liberal democracy.

Free speech is a fundamental tenet of liberal western democracies, and freedom of speech includes the right to upset others. It’s a tradition without which free and open societies simply couldn’t function. (This newspaper wouldn’t exist, for a start.)

Muslims must accept that this is the way we operate. Free speech is part of the price they pay to live in a country that enjoys an unparalleled reputation for freedom and human rights. When they come here, they buy the package.

They should also come to terms with the idiosyncratic New Zealand sense of humour, which holds nothing sacred but is hardly ever malicious.

Perhaps most important of all, Muslims should realise that nothing is more likely to arouse resentment against them than the perception that having migrated here, they now insist on us modifying our behaviour to suit them.

* * *

I AM no fan of the Pope, nor of the creaking ecclesiastical bureaucracy that he represents, but I thought the British media allowed its anti-Catholic bias to get in the way of fairness and balance in its coverage of the recent papal visit.

Stories in advance of the visit were overwhelmingly negative. Anti-Catholic feeling remains strong in Britain, and nowhere more so than in the aggressively secular media. Most journalists in the liberal press clearly wanted the visit to fail, and did their best to ensure that outcome by focusing relentlessly on the clerical abuse scandal and playing up planned protests.

They must have been bitterly disappointed that after all their hard work, the visit seems to gone off quite successfully.

The media bias was evident in the coverage of a comment by Cardinal Walter Kasper which touched off a firestorm the day before the Pope touched down. Kasper, a high-ranking papal aide, was quoted as describing Britain as a “Third World” country. Cue the predictable howls of outrage.

But when you read Kasper’s comment in context, it wasn’t the bald, sweeping statement that the media made it out to be. What he said was: “When you land at Heathrow you at times think you are in a Third World country”. Anyone who has been to London in the past 20 years, and seen what a polyglot society it has become, would know exactly what he was talking about. He wasn’t comparing Britain to Bangladesh or Zimbabwe.

A Vatican spokesman said the cardinal was making a point about Britain’s cultural diversity. He might have chosen his words more sensitively – Catholic prelates are not noted for their PR skills – but it was hardly the insult the hostile British media made it out to be.

The papal visit also provided an excuse for a fresh outbreak of Acute Sensitivity Disorder, a condition first identified in this column some months ago.

Pope Benedict said in a speech that Britain had stood against “Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society”. It’s hard to see how anyone could take offence at that – but no, the Humanist Society of Scotland decided it was a slight against atheists; that the Pope was comparing non-believers with Nazis.

“The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God,” a press statement spluttered.

Now there’s a breathtaking non sequitur for you. Clearly the Scottish atheists weren’t going to let a papal visit pass without seizing the opportunity to make idiots of themselves.