Beating The Basic

Since I was a kid, I’ve always hated the idea of being paraded through the endless charade of basic concepts that everyone knows (or should know) don’t work out so perfectly most of the time. My disposition against “the basic” has resulted in arguments with teachers, figures of authority, friends, relatives, and strangers at Starbucks. At heart though, the biggest problem with basic is that, by design, it is meant to follow some set of rules. But, as we learn from an early age, rules are made to be broken.

If nothing else, the very existence of the phrase “what if?” serves as the much appreciated bane to basic’s existence. Because, only rarely, can you find rules that are flawlessly functional, I find it useful to frequently be aware of the basic, but simultaneously choose to ignore it.

In marketing, the basic is one of the worst things that you can do for a product. Following rules, copying the competition, and upholding the status quo are surefire roads to a rude awakening and they’re all parts of what are certainly “the basics.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that products can’t be simple; they can. Simple and basic are a world apart from one another and, just because something is one, that doesn’t mean that the other is true. Little Miss Matched’s mismatched pairs of socks are simple but they are by no means basic. At an early age, you surely learned the “basic” rule that socks are meant to be identical to one another. The fact of the matter, however, is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Rules are meant to be broken.