Tech-Bro Cringe Meets the X Games

The importance of digital self-awareness, a new understanding of buzzwords, and the commodification of everything you love.

Guess who’s back. (Credit: Forbes)

I. One little letter, so much baggage.

I haven’t used Twitter in years but have nonetheless found myself aggravated by its rebranding to X. In this New York Times piece, 2x4 Partner Michael Rock found the words I couldn’t: “I can imagine it appeals to Elon Musk’s persona as alternative, edgy, mysterious or punk, but it comes across as tech-bro cringe.”

The article’s author,

Stella Bugbee

, plays the role of a good therapist by articulating why Millennials might feel the letter has such a try-hard ring to it. Throughout the ‘90s, X was simultaneously rebellious and mass-produced, falsely anti-corporate. Think X Games, Xbox, X-Files, and Gen X, Musk’s own generation, which came of age during this period.

Remarkably, Musk sounds tone-deaf despite the fact that today, the ‘90s and early 2000s are popular cultural reference points. Lower Manhattan is overcrowded with JNCOs clones, Sambas, and skate shoes, and even mall prep brands like Hollister are having a moment thanks to Adam Jockle. (Side note: A$AP Rocky was ahead of his time with the Osiris D3 reference.) Walking down the street can feel like a time warp; it is not uncommon for me to see an outfit I would’ve worn in middle school on someone that has genuine cultural influence today.

Ultimately, the internet flattens time and rewards self-awareness, and there’s an interplay between both sides of the equation you have to get right. When you don’t, you end up as the internet’s next favorite thing: cringe. Be Adam, not Elon.

II. The internet has turned us all into liars.

In news to no one, this Times article reminds us, “‘Marketers have been using scientific-sounding buzzwords to sell products for centuries. But it’s becoming more common,’ said Timothy Caulfield,” the man who coined the term scienceploitation. From there, the story goes where you expect it to go — the rise of the wellness industry has given rise to the abuse of wellness claims on the part of brands trying to sell wellness products. They’re microbiome-friendly, skin-detoxing, probiotic, energy-enhancing, and so on.

Setting aside the fact that this issue really took off when Reagan deregulated advertising in the 1980s, I think the piece is missing the point. The issue is not that buzzwords are becoming more common on a brand-to-buzzword ratio. It’s that distribution has moved from store shelves to websites, social networks, and marketplaces. There’s more noise coming from more directions, and it doesn’t pass through any sort of filter before it reaches consumers’ ears.

When you couple that shift with the supersaturation in digital marketplaces of categories like beauty and wellness, you end up with compounding issues: overcrowding, marketing desperation, and technical pressure.

• Overcrowding: You’re not on a store shelf beside ten competitors. You’re on a digital shelf with tens of thousands of competitors.

• Marketing desperation: To stand out, you have to push your claims just one step further; you have to be just a little bit cleaner, more efficacious, more sustainable.

• Technical pressure: By design, your target consumer won’t even find you if you don’t put the right word in your copy. If your product is not technically a probiotic — a live microorganism — but it does support gut health, you better sneak a probiotic mention into your listing.

In a way, yes, it’s more common, as Caulfield claims, but the real story — and the solution to it — has more to do with the means of distribution and marketing than it does with the categories themselves. The problem is neither new nor going anywhere. It’s only going to get worse.

III. You can’t win the Tour de France on cobblestones.

In When to Dig a Moat,

Packy McCormick

speaks of the idea of uncertainty cover for startups: “The more obvious your idea is and the easier it is to build, the faster you need to dig moats. Conversely, the less obvious your idea is and the harder it is to build, the longer you have to dig moats.” For context, McCormick quotes Hamilton Helmer in 7 Powers to define moats as “those barriers that protect your business’s margins from the erosive forces of competition.”

I read this half a dozen times trying to understand why my day-to-day work focuses so much on differentiation but so little on the idea of moats, particularly as they relate to time and uncertainty. Initially, I thought the reason was simple: I focus on consumer goods, and McCormick focuses on technology. Even consumer goods with a point of scientific differentiation — i.e. skincare focused on the microbiome — rarely create a widely-adopted, distinct category of their own. (I’m using category here as a CPG equivalent to a new technology, like AI.)

That said, if you widen the definition of new and focus on brands that have reintroduced or substantially redefined a traditional category, the picture takes up the whole screen. You end up with multivitamins (Ritual), cookware (Great Jones), olive oil (Brightland), dog food (Maev), bedsheets (Brooklinen), sexual wellness (Maude), hair-loss treatments (Keeps), painkillers (Hilma), and the list goes on. Some of these concepts have existed for thousands of years and are therefore obvious. By MCormick’s definition, they need a moat, and fast.

For a technology comparison, McCormick uses GPT Wrappers — AI startups built on OpenAI’s technology — which are defenseless as a result of their dependency on technology anyone else can use to build the same thing. Unfortunately and increasingly, consumer brands have the exact same problem. Almost every aspect of brand development has been commodified — including manufacturing. Alibaba even has a guide for it:

You own a fitness brand and want to start selling home gym equipment. You don’t have a design team or factory that can help you to develop a branded product range.

Heading online, you find a private labeling manufacturer in China who has ready to ship goods that are unbranded. After contacting the factory, you send over your branding guidelines and logo and place an order for kettlebells, dumbbells, and resistance bands in a range of sizes and colors that you want.

The manufacturer applies your logo and tagline, along with any additional branding guidelines you’ve provided, such as colors, font, graphics. They also follow your packaging requirements and ship your products directly to you.

You receive branded, ready to sell home fitness equipment. How much you choose to sell your goods for is completely up to you!

As a result, time will almost never be your moat. A combination of research, development, foresight, and positioning prowess gave the original brands an earned head start, but then a dozen others combined a contract manufacturer with an Upwork designer, a Shopify account, and ShipBob to offload a half-as-good alternative.

Or, of course, they went to Amazon and removed half of the steps. For a sense of the scale of Amazon’s impact, consider this: in a single holiday season, hundreds of thousands of individual Amazon sellers move a combined 1 billion units. Given that third-party sellers constitute around 60% of Amazon’s sales, 600 million of those units were sold by a seller base that is largely composed of middle-people. They will take your Alibaba kettlebells, list them, ramp up media costs through minor contributions, and crowd out the brands that thoughtfully reopened the category.

Ultimately, you end up with a dangerous combination: easy access to brand development, easy access to distribution, and easy access to marketing. And each player in each of those steps — Alibaba, Amazon, Shopify, Squarespace, ShipBob, ShipMonk, Upwork, Fiverr, and so on — is, by definition, trying to make that process even easier. They are eliminating time as a moat.

There is a positive side to this, though. The thoughtful brands start the wave, and the copycats grow it. Because the thoughtful brands have the depth, thought, and voice to build a meaningful online and offline presence, they attract a higher share of the consumers the wave catches, they retain those consumers, and they grow as the category grows. After all, look at what’s happening to Amazon aggregators: the copycats are crowding themselves out.