The Same to you.

I’ve always thought that marketing and advertising was about highlighting the differences and stressing the benefits of all that was on offer. I can’t help wondering if all that has changed or if I was simply wrong in the first place. Is it my imagination or are things becoming a bit samey? I know the observation has been made before but even I have noticed the changes in our lifestyle now. When I was young it was very important not only to look different from everyone else but to be different too. There were fashions of course, but there were a lot of them, all at once. OK to be a team player, but we all wanted to be the best player in the team. I am a member of the National Trust and much enjoy visiting those wonderful old houses and places of interest so carefully preserved for future generations to appreciate. Each and every one I visit is different, the owner, architect, builder, decorator and caretaker all had the same objective in mind…”Be different, say who I am and what I stand for.” There was a time when just to be British made you different in the eyes of those who were not. Not any more! Sameness rules OK.
 
Think now about modern buildings, what statements are they making? For a start I doubt they will stand the test of time and most look the same. I say most because there are some new buildings that seem to want to be different but they are few and far between. With music, a short ten year burst produced Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley and others. All new, unique and very different sounds, all instantly recognisable and all enduring to this day. Now their successors all sound the same, different songs, yes, but the sound is so similar as to be almost unidentifiable.
 
People too; all seem to want to look alike. During the reign of Mao Tse-Tung all the Chinese wore those ghastly boiler suits, they all looked the same probably by decree. We would never look like that would we? No one would ever convince our people young or old to dress alike would they? And those travel programmes on the telly, the ones where you see obscure tribes that wear bones through their noses or rings around their necks to make them look longer, or ears that droop under the weight of ornaments and faces covered in war paint. No one would ever persuade the people in the west to do that sort of thing would they?  Or would they? Well that’s what I’m on about.
 
Walk through any high street and what do you see? Most people wearing blue jeans and tee shirts with advertising slogans on them….or is that the designer’s name? I suppose there is a difference. Few are nicely cleaned and pressed. Many of the jeans are grubby, some are ripped, to conform to fashion? others have legs that start at the knee, most look as though they have been slept in or recently worn on a building site and, worst of all, are too short or too small allowing scraps of tired looking underwear and grotty tattoos to surface every time the person bends forward. YUK!!!. In the summer young men wandered about with no shirt on and young women with little more. The result is a scene that reflects an apparent desire to be the same as everyone else even if it does mean looking as slovenly as everyone else. Both sexes behave in similar ways when seeking entertainment, even children now try to dress as adults, all wear trainers though if the evidence of their weight is anything to go by I’d be surprised if any ever train. Add to that the growing number of young women disfiguring themselves with bits of metal stuck around their faces and even on their tongues and you must admit that the pursuit of sameness is going a bit far.
 
It doesn’t stop there, with a few notable exceptions cars all look the same now, and the appearance of the high street is becoming so standardised that you’ll soon be hard put to decide whether you are in Middlesborough or Middle Wallop. Even the out of town retail parks all look the same and are all constructed as if the planning permission was only granted on a temporary basis. The names of the shops are the same wherever you are and the products all look alike too. Even the advertisements that brought you to the shops are basically the same, they all say how cheap the product is and hardly ever tell you how good. It’s become difficult to tell one political party from another and when politicians wish to make a telling point they will immediately produce evidence of what other countries are doing and insist we should be doing the same.
 
Well sameness isn’t for me, though having read through this blog I realise that it sounds just like those comments and remarks made by those Grumpy Old Blokes on the telly a while back, all of whom were from my generation….maybe we weren’t so different after all.