This morning I read Seth Godin’s newest book “We Are All Weird“.  Don’t be too impressed it’s only about 100 pages so it’s a perfect Sunday morning read.  Deep into it, he talks about a friend of his that started a string of boutique hotels in Los Angeles.  He goes on to say that Hyatt jumped on the bandwagon and started a chain of trendy boutique hotels, but something felt ‘off’.  From the framed Beatle’s record to the “Oops” eraser on the desk.  Mass produced “weird”, he calls it.  No wonder it doesn’t work.

I started thinking about that more and it finally hit me.  This is why “weird” bugs me.  It’s not the weird itself, but the popularization of the ‘weird’.  Who else is completely driven nuts by the t-shirt that says “Why Be Normal”?  It’s not that the shirt exists that bugs me.  It’s the fact that the person wearing it got it at Target because they saw five other people wearing that shirt and thought it was cool.  Mass production of “weird” is no longer weird.  It’s annoying.  Especially to the ‘weird’.

Think about it.  How many hipster’s out there are completely annoyed that Jónsi is on a Chevy commercial?  Or that you can hear Fleet Foxes at the grocery store?  What was once “weird” has been commercialized and now it’s not “indie”.  It’s not weird.  And it’s not cool.

I had a friend who would wear leather Indian moccasins.  You know, the kind with the tassels?  He wore them because they were ‘weird’.  They were different than other shoes and he thought they were cool.  He didn’t want ANYONE to find out that you could get those exact moccasins at Urban Outfitters for $30.  Because if that happened, POOF, not cool or weird anymore.

Get to the point Brody.

Seth, speaking about the Hyatt hotels says this,

“It doesn’t’ work because while they did the surface things, the easy things, the cheap things, they failed to do the hard work of being (and embracing) the weird.  It’s sort of weird for the masses, not the actual work of a human being with interests.”

I’m looking at you record labels.

How many times have you seen one artist do the same “weird” thing another artist did six months before?  I’ve said it before in my “Spaghetti” post, but just because it works for one band doesn’t mean it’s going to work for another.  Labels, you’ve taken the ‘weird’ parts of what certain artists do and tried to make every artist their style of “weird”.  You’re adding leather moccasins to the Urban Outfitter’s inventory, and by doing that you’re ruining the coolness of weird.

Like Seth said, “no one wants to do the hard work of embracing the weird”. Instead labels try to generalize the “weird” and hope it works for everyone. Maybe the Facebook gimmick isn’t going to work this time. Maybe the Twitter campaign doesn’t matter to this crowd.  Maybe we’ll have to come up with something just a little different this time around.

See, if there’s one thing that fans see through, it’s the fake weird. It’s the generalized tactics. Especially with the Internet, we can now pick and choose our version of cool and as soon as someone else thinks our version of cool is cool, it’s no longer cool. The same goes with marketing tactics. We’re already seeing articles about how “uncool” Kickstarter is, or the abuse of Twitter in marketing. It’s too mainstream, so it’s not cool anymore.  Nobody really thinks the person wearing the “Normal Is Boring” shirt is weird.  They think they are like everyone else…. or normal.

“Don’t dress up your general and pretend it’s particular. It’s not.  Average is for marketers who don’t have enough information to be accurate.”, says Godin. And I completely agree.  Study your fan base, study your artists, learn their “weird” and embrace that.  And for crying out loud, throw away that “Opps” eraser.