Technology Nostalgia

Guess this stuff has been around for long enough for a viable nostalgia industry to have emerged. 

These two are examples of this. The first is a company producing these 'retro' Apple decals for your latest Apple device, and the second is a reboot (sorry) of a once defunct brand - the much loved C64 - where the original casing is considered cool enough to be desirable. 

So the fan-boy within me just thinks this a cool thing, the thing I really respond to is the inference of 'classic' in both these examples. In the Apple case people are reaching back and selecting elements of the brand's history that they (not Apple) feel are relevant today, lending credibility to the companies' past and badging themselves as 'original' Apple advocates. 

And, in the C64 case the company is bringing back an object that is closely tied to the beginning of the home PC boom of the last 20 to 30 years. It's re-launch draws a line under a period of personal computing defined by paradigms of work (the QWERTY keyboard) and driven by the bedroom programmers who have most recently delivered services like Facebook.

So just back to Apple briefly, Steve Wozniak recently said that Tablet computers are "for the normal people in the world". So if the retro Apple stickers and the relaunched C64 tell the story up to today, the new burst of Tablets and Smartphones suggest the next chapter will tell a more connected, aware, professional (and of course monetised) story. 

That makes me feel nostalgic again ...

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Service Authenticity

I recently stumbled across a beautiful oil skin bag self-sew kit in the Design Museum. A bit of digging revealed it is from a draper in Hay on Wye called Merchant & Mills – here's what they say about themselves "We like stark design and clear words. We reference our roots. We acknowledge the 21st Century."

This put me in mind of another company I love: Labour & Wait, who say they "believe in a simple, honest approach to design ... we endeavour to search out specialist makers from around the world, who continue to manufacture goods in the traditional way to their original designs ... therefore appropriate in a traditional or modern environment"

Neither of these companies are massive brands, but they do inspire a fiercely loyal and articulate following. At the heart of what both these brands offer is 'authenticity', an idea which due to straightened times and pressures on people's wallets, has been entering the mainstream for a little while. Need a mainstream example? How about this Budgens supermarket, who grow their own food on their roof and sell it in store every Friday. These brands inhabit a world where the consumer chooses to engage with the history of an item, it's purpose & form, it's relevance to daily life (both theirs and everyone's) and weighs this the value for money equation they are running in the bg. 

So, the principles mentioned in the two examples above: 

• clarity - of purpose and message; 
• relevance - to present day needs and behaviours;
• continuity - from the original ethos or purpose to the current offer

... clearly work well for a brand dealing with physicality, but are they applicable to the intangible as well as the tangible?

Well I'd certainly hope so. And a brand that can't achieve these three things will I think start to struggle in the next few years.

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