Human beings have always been attracted to images. From early cave paintings to traveling displays of giant canvases by the Hudson River school of painters to TV and on now into the ubiquity of images in the digital era, we pay attention. Marketers have known this and exploited it to attract our attention and shape our purchasing patterns. But, perhaps the ceaseless clamoring for our attention by marketers is reaching its final stage of saturation in which our brains simply shut down and go on attention strike.
A recent NYTimes article, All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD – How Amazon is causing us to drown in trademarks. by John Herman (2/11/2020) describes how Amazon’s ecosystem is driving an explosion of branding, most of it of the most mindless perfunctory quality. This could be the law of unintended consequences in action. The internal logic of Amazon’s marketplace makes terrific sense. A plethora of choices from all around the world. But feeding a tsunami of branding, logos, marketing images, all leading to a dulling of the senses and ultimately a shutdown.
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