Joy division

People are getting tired of the tracking. The quantifiable self, as reports go, is not making people happier and there’s a backlash fomenting.

This backlash — related to but not restricted by some of my earlier notes on dopamine design’s hacking of your neural wiring with empty visual calories — is against the over-optimization of everything. Everything dosed, everything minimized, streamlined, adoption-proofed to a point of barely noticing anything has happened.

A recent post from packaging wizzes at No Issue put it this way: “The result is a marketplace and a culture that runs beautifully and feels like nothing.” Oof.

And the Global Wellness Summit also described the swing away from optimization as the defining cultural trend of the year.

The easy thing, as always, in moving with the cultural swing of things is to just do the next thing. Market moves fun; we move fun, too. Even things that might not even make sense are trying very hard to be fun. Have we seen enough “fun” dentists, or vitamins or cleaning products? And do we believe it for even a minute?

It’s not like noticing brands moving with the trend is going to a) stop it from happening, b) mean it’s always a bad thing, or c) make every brand move a serious forever-level decision. Yet, the point remains that what matters about a brand, as with actual people, is what remains true about them in the face of changing external circumstances.

What matters about a brand, as with people, is what remains true about them in the face of changing circumstances.

Which is why the thinking from founders behind Culture Pop and Goodles, overheard in recent interviews with Nombase/BevNet, feels so remarkable. Why Goodles is basically blasting off shelf, creating category demand that didn’t actually exist before.

Neither Goodles’ Heather Wood nor Culture Pop’s Tom First launched with the intention of bringing the fun version of the same formulations to market. There’s really no room for a funner mac ’n’ cheese. The whole concept is already childlike, innocent, rooted in nostalgia and about as basic as your microwave quick-start button.

What’s at play, though, is redemption. These mass-market fun products have lost their soul, or it’s become plainer that they never really had one to begin with. And they accumulated a bit of a bad rap amidst shifting awareness of nutritional implications and willingness to embrace the idea that good-for-you can actually taste good.

And that’s exactly what both Goodles and Culture Pop set out to accomplish. Not trend-chasing, joymaxxing or rushing to scale something off the back of a viral wave. The whole point was making something, as Woods expressed it, ”timeless.”

From spending the time nailing recipe development to making sure the story on the package was the correct one, their resources were actually converging on the point that mattered most to customers. The “yum” inside the box.

Everyone chasing the same efficiency levers, as in the optimization game we’re all tired of, produces the same output. The same funnels, the same graphic treatments, even the same copy sometimes. But that’s also what happens when everyone rushes to pull a new lever. Whether it’s fun, or joy, or editorializing, or heritage or brutal. It all gets hooked on a feeling, and when the feelings fade, we’re left to examine which things about us are the things that do not wash away in shifting tides.

That’s the actual distinction here. It’s not about fun vs. serious. New vs. old. It’s borrowed vs. owned.

Goodles and Culture Pop landed on joy. It’s not entirely incidental, even with it largely being a characteristic inherent to their categories. It’s notable that either one of them could have decided to lean harder into wellness and quantification — though, it’s also notable they’re not overlooking demand for these markers on their packaging.

So while the brand team has popularly, unofficially and — let’s be realistic — probably only temporarily, become the joy division, it was sort of the job all along. And what Goodles and Culture Pop have shown us so well is that it’s not because the joy was manufactured or layered on top like frosted icing on a cracked wheat protein bar. It was the essence of the thing itself, made visible from inside out.