UNCERTAIN PEOPLE BUY MORE STUFF

Manufactured Inadequacy

TL;DR: As growth flattens, brands are working harder to get their audiences to spend.
How do they (ok, we, I) do it? By making you feel shit about yourself.

Suzanne Koller for Raey, AW22 via AnotherMag

It’s yesterday. It’s late. I’m tired. I’m setting my phone’s alarm clock before reading myself to sleep. But first I just check my feeds one last quick time.

And I see her. Suddenly the outfit I’ve hung on the back of the door for my meeting tomorrow feels lame. In fact my whole morning routine now feels chaotic. My hair, my skin, my life, dull now that I’ve seen hers. I want her bag. And to renovate my kitchen. What’s that retinoid she’s using?

By the time I realise what's happening to me, I’m clicking a shopping link.

It only took a split-second. In my bedroom, in the dark, quietly.

It’s manufactured inadequacy. It's what we do.

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Manufactured inadequacy isn’t something I can claim to be neutral about. Or surprised to get stung by like that, late at night. Because it’s my job to help create it.

My job (my business) is to help brands grow. I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and in that time have recognised a few patterns.

So I know things no business leader wants you to know: we like it when you feel bad about yourself.

Not too bad. That would probably stop you buying the things.

Just the right amount of inadequate.

I need to say it: no business leader I’ve ever worked with is an awful, venal person with a Dr Evil tattoo. Far from it. These people live in (under?) the same systems as everyone else. And the really good ones truly believe their job is to find ways to make life better, more interesting, easier, for their customers, in some way. Most would, I’m sure, not recognise what I’m talking about here. In fact I hope none of them read this because this isn’t something that’s discussed. Ever.

But it’s true. It’s the thing nobody’s saying, but everyone’s thinking.

It’s why no brand will ever invest its marketing dollars in telling you you're great, everything is awesome and you're perfect as you are.

Some will make it seem like that's what they're saying. But they're not. They never are.

If you think I’m wrong give me the name of any brand/campaign you like in the comments and I’ll tell you why I’m right. Because brand-building, like the capitalism it’s part of, thrives on - relies on - our worst feelings…envy, shame, guilt, loneliness, inadequacy. Happy, contented, secure people make rubbish customers.

They're not the ones panic-buying before a party/date/job interview, or scrolling instead of sleeping at 11pm, or saving up for status symbols.

Becasue when you work in the aspiration economy like I do, we’re not concerned with needs, or with consumer demand. We deal in desire. The stuff aspirational brands sell don’t address a need. They satisfy a desire. So the mechanics are different. We need to understand our philosophy as well as our economics and marketing science.

For example Lacan. He said that without lack, there is no desire.

So we need to remind you what you lack. In your wardrobes/homes/makeup bags…but also in your inner self, your personality, your very being. That’s when we get to the really good stuff.

Like writer, filmmaker, and activist Astra Taylor put it in her 2023 book:
“Capitalism not only exploits insecurities…it generates them for profit.”

We do. We need to identify and map an audience that’s not only addressable, but also suggestible. Open to transforming or evolving themselves into something ‘better’…that our brand can be part of. Buying themselves into being, as we discussed here earlier this year. Self-actualising, if you like triangles.

And in this fiscal environment, it's getting worse. So we’re getting worse.

As the paths to growth soften (…saturated sectors, cost of living crises, inflation, diminished consumer confidence and spending power, economic slowdowns, tightening access to capital, underconsumption-core, the sharing economy, tariff chaos, or even the threat of these things affecting consumer confidence) brands are having to work harder.

We manufacture desire by manufacturing anxiety.

Look at the fashion system's accelerated trend cycle. What used to be predictable, set seasons has become endless drops and overlapping micro-trends. The moment you feel settled in your style, confident in your choices, something new arrives to make those choices feel outdated, irrelevant, embarrassing, tragic.

SHEIN is famously now releasing up to 10,000 new items a day. That's not about satisfying consumer demand for 'inspiration'. It's hazing…deliberately creating dissatisfaction and obsolescence.

Or like Jessica DeFino said in her still-blistering 2021 Substack essay Beauty Culture Is a Public Health Issue:

“Beauty culture…systematically breaks down self-esteem and installs shame, so that it can then sell “confidence” back to you.”

The more inadequate we feel, the more valuable we are.

So we must be held in a state of forever self-doubting, forever lacking, forever running to keep up.

This all might be very obvious to you, or maybe you feel personally attacked. One thing we can be sure of is that it’s been going on since the dawn of consumer culture as we know it.

From those 1960s Betty-Draper-alike suburban housewives (who had it all, but felt nothing) we talked about a year ago in The Problem That (Still) Has No Name…

…to the twelve women wearing the very same ‘fit that morning in London, who sparked my meh-ification theory that’s been written and spoken about so much since (like this and this in Ana Andjelic’s The Sociology of Business)...

there’s a whole canon of research on compensatory consumption - our tendency to buy things whenever our sense of self feels destabilised, confused or threatened.

For example Boston University’s Dr. Nailya Ordabayeva wrote in 2015 about people engaging in status consumption when they felt inferior or uncertain about their social standing.

And consumer psychologist Dr. Kit Yarrow’s work on the phrase retail therapy. Her studies found that the act of shopping often serves not just practical needs, but also emotional regulation…by activating the brain's reward centres and temporarily soothing psychological discomfort.

The system doesn't just sell stuff. It sells relief.

Maybe sitting behind it all is what Byung-Chul Han talks about in The Burnout Society: over time we've moved from a disciplinary society that told us what we couldn't do, to an achievement society that tells us everything we can do and be.

But at this point it feels like no matter what we do/buy/wear/have, we're unlikely to ever truly feel like we’re ‘enough’.

Which ofc is on purpose. Because the worse we feel about ourselves, the more we want to spend on ourselves.

This is consumer culture’s dirty secret: nobody really wants to solve your problems, they want to perpetuate them.

Welcome to the insecurity machine, where we manufacture inadequacy.
It's working perfectly. Just not for you.

Thanks for reading/see you next time.

Beth

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In other news, a little thank you.

I got a message this week saying Pat Rec is number 29 in Substack’s Fashion & Beauty global leaderboard. I don’t truly know exactly what it means, but I know it’s a big deal given that this side of Substack has become so incredibly popular and thriving.

This list is full of well-respected industry experts and creatives who share actual fashion/beauty recs, news, ideas and links (…which I know are prob very much more interesting and easy to engage with than what I write about) so I’m officially saying thank you for making my strain of cultural analysis-y writing so popular. It gives me hope in these weird weird times of ours. x