I really appreciate this article. I studied graphic design in college and during my time as a student I had similar sentiments as what you share. I often disliked how professors didn't challenge my peers enough to design something beautiful that isn't for a screen and without using a computer. Modern design and advertising is not at all what it used to be. Something about the craft has been lost due to the digital prevalence of modern culture. Many people think, "Why put any effort in making a clever ad when people will only "swipe" by it?". Much to think about, and plenty of work to be done to change the tide of the "infant" trend. Thank you for writing about this!
I'm glad it resonated! We are really in need of design that is both beautiful and tech-friendly, as well as unique and relevant to the company or product it relates to.
I also studied graphic design and while reading this, I thought that designers are complicit in this trend. Someone did the brand consulting and design for all of these lookalikes.
The industry at large needs to reconsider the companies it works with. Do they actually serve a purpose or are you just putting pastel lipstick on pigs?
Also, starting a useful, profitable business is starting to look like a thing of the past. So many seem to rely on vibes, hype and venture capital.
Thank you for verbalizing the weird, haunting feeling I've had when walking into *hip* gift shops that seem to exclusively sell these kinds of products. Everything looks the same, like I'm in some kind of freakish, pastel hall of mirrors.
Clicked on this because the example image of branding made me feel like i was looking at the baby "makeup" section they sell at Claire's (or used to) with neon glittery lipgloss cases and oversized hair clips and knew whatever you had to say would be spot on. I also think it's interesting this kind of marketing ia almost entirely aimed at women under the tag 'cool girl' and thought about an essay i read a few days ago about the trend of 'i'm just a girl'ing everything to use self-infantalization as a comfort and how companies infantalizing consumers is such a chicken/egg situation. Are we clinging to youth and falling for nostalgia/baby marketing as a result, or is nostalgia/baby marketing trying to influence us to cling to it because it's easy to just print a pastel logo instead of making quality products.
It's wild because I'm a 45 year old woman and I remember the desperate yearning of my teen years to be adult and sophisticated, so this entire thing is baffling to me. I have gone back to buying Revlon lipstick because if I'm going to get nostalgic for the 90s, I might as well buy the literal exact same Rum and Raisin lipstick in the same packaging I wore back then. I guess the good news is that it's easier than ever to avoid spontaneous purchasing because none of these babified products appeal to me at all.
Great piece! Side note, I HATE the company Tend because its brand name is just SO stupid. I do not want to be "tended" to by your cringey hipster corporate dentists... Get AWAY from my mouth!!!
You've articulated the feeling I had when several local optometrists retired and something called Eyecon took their places. I'm going to try to find a "regular" eye doc.
The environmental impact of wasteful CPG makes me so depressed. My boomer grocery store has a wellness section with rows and rows of mushroom powders, nootropic drinks and vitamin patches. Very shiny snake oil and it’s just a waste waiting for the landfill.
I’m still stuck on the Boohbah mention omg. I used to call it a fever dream show because no one I know except my sisters remembers it haha.
Nevertheless, this article is a stunner. I agree with all of the above. The infantilisation of brands reminds me of how talking to a baby exclusively in baby talk can be harmful for a toddlers’ development. Miss me with the, “goo goo gah gah”, we deserve wit, ethos, authenticity and honesty!
The marketing to the ‘kidult’ point is super fascinating — I’ll probably be thinking about it for a while. Thank you!
(I realize this is a bit late but your piece only JUST popped up on my feed)
Few thoughts, and not trying to be rude at all! I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on illustration in design, etc. I’m a designer so all of this is always on my mind and I’m glad I stumbled across your essay - it gave me a lot to think about:
I agree with many of your points, especially the over-saturation and wastefulness of trends and marketing as well as the over-pricing of trendy design. I’m not a fan of a lot of the names and slogans and ads we have these days either but, I do wonder at what point we equate non-hyperrealist illustration with “infantilizing” design simply because it doesn’t feed the idea that “minimalism is the smartest, most sophisticated design style!” I fear we keep giving our money to minimalism in the hopes to seem put together, wealthy, and sophisticated (see Clean Girl) when it really just takes away from the personality of things and people while being just another marketing trend itself. I also don’t feel some of the examples you gave for smart design were very… creative. A lot of them were just one picture, a bunch of negative space and some large, sans-serif text. Not to say that can't be creative but, I didn't resonate with it being "smarter" than the infantilizing examples you gave.
Hopefully any of that makes sense, thank you for the food for thought!
thanks for your thoughts! I'd say that I actually find a lot of the "infantilizing" designs to BE minimalist, i.e. i definitely don't champion minimalist (a lot of times boring) design. Lots of these cute, one syllable company names with a simple sans serif font could be considered minimalist in my view. Moreso what should be championed is design with personality - it can be funny, maximalist, etc. I'm not a designer and work in finance so these were sort of an outsider's thoughts
In the 1960s, there were two trends, the sans serif modern now-a-go-go and the too cutesy old tyme retro usually referencing the 1890s and up to the war. This has been the design dialog forever or at least since the rise of consumer surplus. Someone had to make La Tene ware chic. It’s a valid critique. There was a point in the 1980s when Helvetica collapsed and every company had to go serif. Oh yes, and boring grays and shoulder pads like Romulans. Authenticity is ever changing as new regimes adopt the symbols of ones older than the one they rest on the ruins of. Don’t be shocked by a return of the Myspace esthetic if it can be called that.
hmmm i'd still rather use my purchasing power on "indie"/vc-backed cpgs over brand monopolies lol saying that you see "heterogeneity" in companies like google and adobe is...interesting, but i get your sentiment. also it feels kinda reachy to associate infantilization with bright/flashy colors. i would instead argue that there's a biological/evolutionary/inherent reason for why humans are attracted to shiny things.
i do agree with the "app-ification of society" though - that would be great to read about!
I don't think it's so black and white, you're conveniently forgetting about family-owned brands and small businesses that aren't conglomerates or VC-backed CPG companies
Why is a VC backed company more appealing than a brand monopoly? We're looking at one of the worst VC backed bubbles immanent exploding (generative AI) which has literally trillions pumped into it for pretty much zero profit or usable products. A garbage product is a garbage product whether it's created by a corporation or some "indie" company trying to pump up their valuation for an IPO so the founder can bail out with a billion dollars. They're not exactly somehow more pure or noble than corporations.
I love reading things that articulate a thought or feeling I didn’t even know had been niggling at me. Today I was asking myself why I as a qualified adult feel like a child compared to my seniors who are no more than ten years older than me and this article has played perfectly into my thought process.
“Founders should pursue smart customers, and smart customers want things that enrich their lives, signal status, and make them happy”
I’m definitely sick of being treated like a baby and as a result treating myself like a baby.
AMEN! I was reading this and so surprised when I saw my name. Thank you for including me in this! I couldn't have said it better if I tried. And I agree, I think we need to bring back brands that actually make things, and not act as the middle men between different suppliers. Brands like Flamingo Estate!
Glad this showed up in my feed, even a month later. So insightful and important. I am a long-time critic (well, hater) of VC/PE but hadn’t really focused on the impact on cpg.
But of course - once Vc/PE enters the room, they smear shit on everything. Why should CPG be different?
I do want to bring up some context - this flavor of brand identity first emerged on truly artisanal, local or at least limited-ingredient products, who had no corporate marketing teams to produce something typically slick and stuffy, so they paid their brother a case of beer for something straightforward. Those small brands provided a much needed alternative to the hyper-processed, low quality ingredient versions of everything. Trader Joe’s is in that original group and remains there - it doesn’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
About ten years ago (?) it became clear that Big Food was adopting the same look and feel - got to retain market share! - but you’d never know it if you weren’t reading labels obsessively. And then came the internet and influencers and -here we are.
This is about visual design, but I'm also unable to ignore the voiceovers in most commercials now: infantalizing, usually female, giggle-talking their way through the patronizing and "comforting" sales pitch. I recognize the tone: it's what narrators of TV shows targeted at preschoolers used to sound like.
I was thinking the same thing. Every time I hear that "ad voice" I'm simultaneously like "do you really think I can take you seriously??" and "Who are they actually talking to? It must work on someone?"
Great article. You articulated something I’ve noticed for such a long time. Trader Joe’s is obviously the iconic example, but even as a teenager in the 90’s, I remember when both Ben & Jerry’s launched as a national brand and then when Snapple released, and both of them gave me this exact sensation of adults being marketed to as children, and it made me feel uncomfortable even as a teenager. And of course, as with everything it seems, social media made this phenomenon ubiquitous at an exponential rate.
I’m seeing a lot of people thinking that cutesy items are “cringe” or somehow self-infantilizing, though there’s a well-documented trend amongst millennials of reclaiming lost childhoods, or feeding our inner children, that has been extremely healing for those of us who were neglected or otherwise treated poorly by narcissistic boomer parents.
this is not to speak on the absurdism of brands putting flashy logos on sub-par products for the sake of selling us the color pop and trendiness that will SURELY lead to more popularity (or at least online clout), because that sucks. but I wish we could have conversations like this without Real Women™️ coming out of the woodwork to put other women down for what we’re clearly enjoying. I pass on the $30 375ml bottle of shitty olive oil but I love the shit out of a $2 colorful sticker that I can slap on my colorful water bottle.
plus this is by no means new — this feels more like a resurgence of the wild color pops in advertisements that we saw in the aughts (as we seem to be seeing a ton of things from the aughts making the rounds again), though those leaned more towards ALL CAPS than all lowercase.
thank you! my comment was defo directed at some of the less than savory comments rather than the original piece~ some people just don’t like to let folks enjoy things!
Why do people love these electronics? Does anyone ever really alter how they use appliances?
I was never a heavy, daily dishwasher user but how many dishwashers did I own, at least 3 in about 15 years, that went out and were basically irreparable because e.g. a) the circuit board failed and the part and labor cost as much as a new dishwasher; and b) even if you replaced it, because landfilling the tub seemed wasteful - googling found hundreds of comments on iFixit suggesting that steam would get into the electronics of that model all over again in a year?
My last dishwasher was a tub with a dial, nothing else - the last most basic one they sell. It didn't play a trumpet battle tune. It didn't warm plates or have a crystal setting.
When we moved, I fixated on only a few things from the house we'd lived in 2 decades, and one was that dishwasher we had clumsily installed with a friend's help. My husband returned from a road trip with a surprise - my old dishwasher! Because the little house was being razed he had asked the buyer if he'd mind if he swung by and got the dishwasher, which was not very old.
I then stored it at our landlady's barn, reunited with our washer and dryer. It was plainly absurd, the idea that we, condo renters for the foreseeable future, were going to haul around a dishwasher forever. In the event, the dishwasher in our rental unit never did really work and I said to her, hey, just put in mine! It makes me unreasonably happy to have it. Now I'll be sad when we leave this place ...
I really appreciate this article. I studied graphic design in college and during my time as a student I had similar sentiments as what you share. I often disliked how professors didn't challenge my peers enough to design something beautiful that isn't for a screen and without using a computer. Modern design and advertising is not at all what it used to be. Something about the craft has been lost due to the digital prevalence of modern culture. Many people think, "Why put any effort in making a clever ad when people will only "swipe" by it?". Much to think about, and plenty of work to be done to change the tide of the "infant" trend. Thank you for writing about this!
I'm glad it resonated! We are really in need of design that is both beautiful and tech-friendly, as well as unique and relevant to the company or product it relates to.
I also studied graphic design and while reading this, I thought that designers are complicit in this trend. Someone did the brand consulting and design for all of these lookalikes.
The industry at large needs to reconsider the companies it works with. Do they actually serve a purpose or are you just putting pastel lipstick on pigs?
Also, starting a useful, profitable business is starting to look like a thing of the past. So many seem to rely on vibes, hype and venture capital.
Thank you for verbalizing the weird, haunting feeling I've had when walking into *hip* gift shops that seem to exclusively sell these kinds of products. Everything looks the same, like I'm in some kind of freakish, pastel hall of mirrors.
Scary DTC funhouse for real
Clicked on this because the example image of branding made me feel like i was looking at the baby "makeup" section they sell at Claire's (or used to) with neon glittery lipgloss cases and oversized hair clips and knew whatever you had to say would be spot on. I also think it's interesting this kind of marketing ia almost entirely aimed at women under the tag 'cool girl' and thought about an essay i read a few days ago about the trend of 'i'm just a girl'ing everything to use self-infantalization as a comfort and how companies infantalizing consumers is such a chicken/egg situation. Are we clinging to youth and falling for nostalgia/baby marketing as a result, or is nostalgia/baby marketing trying to influence us to cling to it because it's easy to just print a pastel logo instead of making quality products.
It's wild because I'm a 45 year old woman and I remember the desperate yearning of my teen years to be adult and sophisticated, so this entire thing is baffling to me. I have gone back to buying Revlon lipstick because if I'm going to get nostalgic for the 90s, I might as well buy the literal exact same Rum and Raisin lipstick in the same packaging I wore back then. I guess the good news is that it's easier than ever to avoid spontaneous purchasing because none of these babified products appeal to me at all.
Great piece! Side note, I HATE the company Tend because its brand name is just SO stupid. I do not want to be "tended" to by your cringey hipster corporate dentists... Get AWAY from my mouth!!!
hahahahah exactly. Nobody has EVER associated being "tended" to with going to the damn dentist
"butchered" Perhaps.
You've articulated the feeling I had when several local optometrists retired and something called Eyecon took their places. I'm going to try to find a "regular" eye doc.
This happened in my hometown. This is a terrible phenomenon IMO
The environmental impact of wasteful CPG makes me so depressed. My boomer grocery store has a wellness section with rows and rows of mushroom powders, nootropic drinks and vitamin patches. Very shiny snake oil and it’s just a waste waiting for the landfill.
Ngl I fell for the olive oil and sardines but that squeeze bottle is getting filled up with KIRKLAND when it’s empty
That damn squeeze bottle
But did you buy a sweater for your squeeze bottle at Christmas time?? Haha I did!! They sent me a link and of course they reeled me in.
I’m still stuck on the Boohbah mention omg. I used to call it a fever dream show because no one I know except my sisters remembers it haha.
Nevertheless, this article is a stunner. I agree with all of the above. The infantilisation of brands reminds me of how talking to a baby exclusively in baby talk can be harmful for a toddlers’ development. Miss me with the, “goo goo gah gah”, we deserve wit, ethos, authenticity and honesty!
The marketing to the ‘kidult’ point is super fascinating — I’ll probably be thinking about it for a while. Thank you!
Boohbah was CRAZY. exactly!! we deserve to be spoken to like mature, INTELLIGENT adults
(I realize this is a bit late but your piece only JUST popped up on my feed)
Few thoughts, and not trying to be rude at all! I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on illustration in design, etc. I’m a designer so all of this is always on my mind and I’m glad I stumbled across your essay - it gave me a lot to think about:
I agree with many of your points, especially the over-saturation and wastefulness of trends and marketing as well as the over-pricing of trendy design. I’m not a fan of a lot of the names and slogans and ads we have these days either but, I do wonder at what point we equate non-hyperrealist illustration with “infantilizing” design simply because it doesn’t feed the idea that “minimalism is the smartest, most sophisticated design style!” I fear we keep giving our money to minimalism in the hopes to seem put together, wealthy, and sophisticated (see Clean Girl) when it really just takes away from the personality of things and people while being just another marketing trend itself. I also don’t feel some of the examples you gave for smart design were very… creative. A lot of them were just one picture, a bunch of negative space and some large, sans-serif text. Not to say that can't be creative but, I didn't resonate with it being "smarter" than the infantilizing examples you gave.
Hopefully any of that makes sense, thank you for the food for thought!
thanks for your thoughts! I'd say that I actually find a lot of the "infantilizing" designs to BE minimalist, i.e. i definitely don't champion minimalist (a lot of times boring) design. Lots of these cute, one syllable company names with a simple sans serif font could be considered minimalist in my view. Moreso what should be championed is design with personality - it can be funny, maximalist, etc. I'm not a designer and work in finance so these were sort of an outsider's thoughts
In the 1960s, there were two trends, the sans serif modern now-a-go-go and the too cutesy old tyme retro usually referencing the 1890s and up to the war. This has been the design dialog forever or at least since the rise of consumer surplus. Someone had to make La Tene ware chic. It’s a valid critique. There was a point in the 1980s when Helvetica collapsed and every company had to go serif. Oh yes, and boring grays and shoulder pads like Romulans. Authenticity is ever changing as new regimes adopt the symbols of ones older than the one they rest on the ruins of. Don’t be shocked by a return of the Myspace esthetic if it can be called that.
hmmm i'd still rather use my purchasing power on "indie"/vc-backed cpgs over brand monopolies lol saying that you see "heterogeneity" in companies like google and adobe is...interesting, but i get your sentiment. also it feels kinda reachy to associate infantilization with bright/flashy colors. i would instead argue that there's a biological/evolutionary/inherent reason for why humans are attracted to shiny things.
i do agree with the "app-ification of society" though - that would be great to read about!
I don't think it's so black and white, you're conveniently forgetting about family-owned brands and small businesses that aren't conglomerates or VC-backed CPG companies
Why is a VC backed company more appealing than a brand monopoly? We're looking at one of the worst VC backed bubbles immanent exploding (generative AI) which has literally trillions pumped into it for pretty much zero profit or usable products. A garbage product is a garbage product whether it's created by a corporation or some "indie" company trying to pump up their valuation for an IPO so the founder can bail out with a billion dollars. They're not exactly somehow more pure or noble than corporations.
I love reading things that articulate a thought or feeling I didn’t even know had been niggling at me. Today I was asking myself why I as a qualified adult feel like a child compared to my seniors who are no more than ten years older than me and this article has played perfectly into my thought process.
“Founders should pursue smart customers, and smart customers want things that enrich their lives, signal status, and make them happy”
I’m definitely sick of being treated like a baby and as a result treating myself like a baby.
AMEN! I was reading this and so surprised when I saw my name. Thank you for including me in this! I couldn't have said it better if I tried. And I agree, I think we need to bring back brands that actually make things, and not act as the middle men between different suppliers. Brands like Flamingo Estate!
Your article was one of the catalysts that got my juices flowing for this piece! seconded on flamingo estate.. absolutely love their universe
Glad this showed up in my feed, even a month later. So insightful and important. I am a long-time critic (well, hater) of VC/PE but hadn’t really focused on the impact on cpg.
But of course - once Vc/PE enters the room, they smear shit on everything. Why should CPG be different?
I do want to bring up some context - this flavor of brand identity first emerged on truly artisanal, local or at least limited-ingredient products, who had no corporate marketing teams to produce something typically slick and stuffy, so they paid their brother a case of beer for something straightforward. Those small brands provided a much needed alternative to the hyper-processed, low quality ingredient versions of everything. Trader Joe’s is in that original group and remains there - it doesn’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
About ten years ago (?) it became clear that Big Food was adopting the same look and feel - got to retain market share! - but you’d never know it if you weren’t reading labels obsessively. And then came the internet and influencers and -here we are.
I appreciate the context about TJ’s!
This is about visual design, but I'm also unable to ignore the voiceovers in most commercials now: infantalizing, usually female, giggle-talking their way through the patronizing and "comforting" sales pitch. I recognize the tone: it's what narrators of TV shows targeted at preschoolers used to sound like.
Veryyy good connection. I have such a viscerally disgusted reaction to that “ad voice” now
I was thinking the same thing. Every time I hear that "ad voice" I'm simultaneously like "do you really think I can take you seriously??" and "Who are they actually talking to? It must work on someone?"
We all need a philosophy of comfort now.
Great article. You articulated something I’ve noticed for such a long time. Trader Joe’s is obviously the iconic example, but even as a teenager in the 90’s, I remember when both Ben & Jerry’s launched as a national brand and then when Snapple released, and both of them gave me this exact sensation of adults being marketed to as children, and it made me feel uncomfortable even as a teenager. And of course, as with everything it seems, social media made this phenomenon ubiquitous at an exponential rate.
I’m seeing a lot of people thinking that cutesy items are “cringe” or somehow self-infantilizing, though there’s a well-documented trend amongst millennials of reclaiming lost childhoods, or feeding our inner children, that has been extremely healing for those of us who were neglected or otherwise treated poorly by narcissistic boomer parents.
this is not to speak on the absurdism of brands putting flashy logos on sub-par products for the sake of selling us the color pop and trendiness that will SURELY lead to more popularity (or at least online clout), because that sucks. but I wish we could have conversations like this without Real Women™️ coming out of the woodwork to put other women down for what we’re clearly enjoying. I pass on the $30 375ml bottle of shitty olive oil but I love the shit out of a $2 colorful sticker that I can slap on my colorful water bottle.
plus this is by no means new — this feels more like a resurgence of the wild color pops in advertisements that we saw in the aughts (as we seem to be seeing a ton of things from the aughts making the rounds again), though those leaned more towards ALL CAPS than all lowercase.
Agree that there is nothing wrong with nurturing your inner child!
thank you! my comment was defo directed at some of the less than savory comments rather than the original piece~ some people just don’t like to let folks enjoy things!
How about a line of durable goods and appliances with no electronics built to last 20 years?
I know that tech seems to have been lost in recent decades.. Maybe its gathering dust on dark back shelf a NASA along with the telemetry data
Why do people love these electronics? Does anyone ever really alter how they use appliances?
I was never a heavy, daily dishwasher user but how many dishwashers did I own, at least 3 in about 15 years, that went out and were basically irreparable because e.g. a) the circuit board failed and the part and labor cost as much as a new dishwasher; and b) even if you replaced it, because landfilling the tub seemed wasteful - googling found hundreds of comments on iFixit suggesting that steam would get into the electronics of that model all over again in a year?
My last dishwasher was a tub with a dial, nothing else - the last most basic one they sell. It didn't play a trumpet battle tune. It didn't warm plates or have a crystal setting.
When we moved, I fixated on only a few things from the house we'd lived in 2 decades, and one was that dishwasher we had clumsily installed with a friend's help. My husband returned from a road trip with a surprise - my old dishwasher! Because the little house was being razed he had asked the buyer if he'd mind if he swung by and got the dishwasher, which was not very old.
I then stored it at our landlady's barn, reunited with our washer and dryer. It was plainly absurd, the idea that we, condo renters for the foreseeable future, were going to haul around a dishwasher forever. In the event, the dishwasher in our rental unit never did really work and I said to her, hey, just put in mine! It makes me unreasonably happy to have it. Now I'll be sad when we leave this place ...