Biotech Notes #7: From Premium Mediocre to Creators Biotech
The design and marketing of this era of consumer products and the values I'd imbue a future biotech brand with
Premium mediocre
I heard the awesome designer Emmet Shine talk about this concept before I realized it’d been coined 8 years ago by another dude. So at first I saw it as a design/aesthetics topic only, something like “oh it’s things that pretend to be luxurious and cost a lot but are actually shit”.
The concept is actually SO much deeper. It’s a story about the shrinkage of the American middle class and how corporations leveraged their mimetic desire to feel well-off to create products that serve as a signal more than as substance — Like food that Instagrams better than it tastes, or any product with a “premium” label on it. My favorite way to understand it:
Premium mediocrity is creating an aura of exclusivity without actually excluding anyone.
Beyond that, I think it’s super interesting how the economic setting influences our online behaviors, especially for the get-rich-quick influencer or crypto-trader bros and gals. Yet that doesn’t exclude Maya Millennial or Sofia GenZer, high achievers who haven’t achieved anything big quite yet1 but are willing to shoot their shot by building great personal brands before driving UBER cabs.
When I read that, I couldn’t help but think our dude was just stating the facts… and I also read someone who might just be pissed off at their IVY-league friends who have played whatever this game is better and have a house in Bali plus 100k twitter followers that he wants.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of something being branded as premium, costing a premium, and actually being shit. However, I’ve figured out there’s yet another product category I actually despise with all my heart, and which I think can also reach this pseudo-middle class: Premium stupid™.
Premium stupid is Lululemon pants that will perhaps resist 30 more washes than Uniqlo’s but cost 3x. Premium stupid is Stanley cups that have absolutely no innovation to them but suddenly hundreds of girls and moms in your city are buying them. Longchamp bags that surely cost $1 USD to make but are priced at 10x that. Alo caps. WHOOP. The latest iPhone.
They’re all about signaling. The difference is that, while Premium mediocre barely makes the cut for the Instagram picture, Premium stupid is supposed to be “the real deal”, which the logo and price tag speak for. Stupid does exclude some people, which is why there are lots of copies of them. Mediocre is as bad as you can get, so you can’t really tell if there’s a “better mediocre” option.
Of course most luxury is stupid and that’s kind of the point. My baby designer heart, however, wishes there were brands out there that genuinely cared for creating incredible products with outstanding materials, innovative design, and real functions, and let that inform the price and exclusivity. Instead, I see signaling-first design, and 2nd-hand products that are mere vehicles to play with people’s limbic system and make poor-hearted people richer.
Questions for myself:
How can we create products that make both users and “fans” of those users feel better with themselves?
What products would allow people to balance their creative inputs and outputs? (Avoid consuming more than they create)
How can we balance utilitarianism and experience-oriented design to create products that are desirable both from a utility and aesthetics perspective?
Are we, as humans, just wired to establish social hierarchies and feel the need to signal our place in these?
Social media is cheap, experiences are exclusive
We all know there’s something fundamentally wrong about social media. There’s something utterly wrong with our eyes being glued to screens for hours every day, watching 150 15-second videos about how to be more productive. Something’s really fucked up about the anxiety we feel when we imitate Annie, Joe, and Sam as though they were our blood siblings, just because we watch them every morning.
Little do we know that code (aka AI) choosing what we think because it chooses what we consume is only the beginning.
What will happen when that code BECOMES Annie, Joe, and Sam? Literally today, we could easily create a version of Instagram in which I consume content that is all AI-generated, AI filtered, and I cannot tell.
Then, no surprise: if I am what I consume, I will become AI. Sure, AI that is trying to emulate how the human brain works. It is, regardless, AI. Chips, sand. It’s not alive.
Why in the world would I do that, Sofia? Well why in the world do you already let it decide what you consume therefore what you think?
Zoom, Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, our desktops. These are now the places we spend the most time in. We complain about shitty cities with terrible public transport and buildings that are falling apart. I don’t think we care enough about software that makes us feel bad in the long term, especially social media.
I used to acknowledge these concerns when I heard about them from some people, but the act of truly understanding something, for me goes hand-in-hand with feeling something about it. Just like when I realized that most things around me were once petroleum, or when I understood that many of the “processed” food I would find in the supermarket contains things like corn syrup that is addictive.
Traumatizing the kids sometimes works, but adults are different. They’re already addicted to these things, they don’t like change, they think they know better because they already make their own decisions — I think it is only when you show them a better world to compare and contrast theirs with, when they might get it.
When you savor a peach whose taste and flavor is so sublime that it could never be matched by the careless amounts of sugar and fat in a doughnut. When you talk around millenary mountains and touch the cold water of the river that flows through them with your own hands, and just understand how little it matters whether your apartment is a penthouse. When you read a book written with the author’s full heart, slowly, and it turns your mind around… only then, you can see how uglily, tastelessly, and lifelessly social media has been architected.
Of course this ties back to the premiums. Premium stupid and its copies exist because the true elite is no longer (only?) buying Rolexes but going to space. Experiences are the true exclusive luxuries of today and perhaps the rest of the decade, and I think there’s a chance that their exclusiveness is actually made clear in the absence from social media.
Just think about how cheap photos have become. Kings used to take photos, now a low class person in Mexico can take photos too even if it’s not an iPhone they posses. Not only that, but anyone can share those photos, and get likes. The base of the pyramid now has access to that dopamine-hit service of saying “I was at W, doing X with Y, and I possess Z”. Photos and social media, especially in the era of AI, are now commodities.
We will increasingly find exclusivity as offline, physical goods. Neither mediocre Apple Watch nor stupid Rolex but functional Junghans. Neither mediocre Vox nor Wall Street Journal but some only-print newspaper (is that even profitable?), neither Instagram nor X but Soho Houses. Neither AG1 nor Sweetgreens but some kind of a legit farmers market (is Blueprint premium stupid?).
Creators biotech values
I don’t know anything about creating a brand, except many for what people call a “personal brand”. I know what they mean, but I also think that any brand must be personal because you must believe in it, “you” being the people you convince to join your team, the brand’s key partners, your customers of course, and even the government.
The reason, I think, why we establish a certain connection with some brands more than with others, is because their products are not just great products. They stand for something, and they deliver it, which generates trust. We trust that Apple products will always work, we trust that Starbucks will help us feel socially in, we trust that Google will provide us with all the info we might need, that our shipping will be safe and fast with DHL, that Nike takes out the high performance athlete within us.
Artificial intelligence is one of those big fish in our little blue pond today, and it will unarguably inform much of what we value and thus the way we design the future. In an era of uncertainty, meaning both positive expectations and fear of catastrophe, the values I would imbue into a consumer brand, if I were to build one today, would be the following:
Life above all else: suddenly, in front of AI, we have a lot in common with the rest of the living kingdom, don’t we? Protecting life means not only the right to live but prioritizing life’s needs in front of AI’s. If there could one day be more AI individual brains (or its equivalent) than humans, the mere fact that an artisan from rural Mexico is also a verifiable human, makes their art more valuable, non-fungible, than an AI-generated one. Further, life as a value is not only found in a moving and breathing DNA-containing thing. It is a design quality human creators imbue their surroundings with. When something is designed through the values below, we shall call it “lifefull”.
Question: how does this apply to “human-created” life? Like real wagyu that doesn’t come directly from a cow, or silk that wasn’t grown by worms?
In defense of authenticity: the value that every social media platform dares to preach yet none deliver. Even from an information theory standpoint, some data is lost in translation from ideas to their expression and understanding. Claiming authenticity for something that can inherently not be so is inauthentic. Authenticity for this brand actually starts from within, it means to be honest with yourself about who you are. If you want to put a filter on top of that, do so. Just be aware of it.
We are not as artisans: big corps and governments talk this and that about sustainability, “greenwashing” some call it. Why don’t we all just admit that we are not artisans living in the mountains? Our world today is not economically or socially sustainable without freight, fertilizers, and petrol. We will look for the solutions that actually move the needle in the problems we care about. We will not overpromise and underdeliver.
Care over control: human life, especially in our modern society, is possible because we have motives to wake up in the morning and do something, whatever it is. You might care about your sister, art, money, food, science, yourself. Whatever that is, it gives your life meaning. When something is meaningful to you, there’s no room for ego, mediocrity, or sugar coating. As a brand, we’re not here to conquer the world or humanity, not even markets. We have something much deeper to care about, and these are the values we believe in. The products that we create are vehicles to deliver that care.
Soul reconnection: whatever religion, race, gender, profession, we believe there’s something about living things that kind of transcends what we can currently explain through science. Feelings, the self, intuition, love, altruism… we believe these must be protected from any dark forces of the ugly, the mundane, hate, and the worst of them all, fear. You don’t need a fancy app, expensive coach or certified course to get to know yourself and all the beautiful things you can create. Listen to and trust your gut, for it is always right.
This is of course comparing how well-off their boomer parents were at this age. Will Maya and Sofia reach greater heights but just take longer?