What, in all you just said, is a bind?
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That marketing and design appear necessarily reactionary
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A brand needs to be consistent about something. To identify consistency, designers and users need memory. In order to market something, it needs to be presented with concepts that the buyer is familiar with.
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How do you get from "some amount of consistency and familiarity is required", to "design and marketing must be reactionary"?
I think "reactionary" implies more than simple consistency and familiarity - it is something like a cargo cult of the past.
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I get to “some amount of reactionary” and “some amount of cargo cutting”
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Hmm, I think I disagree. I think my point of divergence with your chain of reasoning is here: "when the desires become legible enough to pursue via a simpler mechanism than recreating the remembered experience" - there is not always a simpler mechanism, legible is not always hard
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If so then the minimum viable reactionary attitude is not zero
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I think an interesting way to see how much is needed is to look at the careers of fiction authors. The publishers want everyone to be like Nora Roberts, but most authors want more variety and novelty than that. The consistency can be something like "from the mind of Neil Gaiman"
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Lois McMaster Bujold talks about how readers don't know how to ask for something new. They mostly just ask for "more of that please". She's successful enough that her name can sell books. There are common characteristics between books, enough it can be a brand.
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Yup faster horse syndrome run much deeper than people realize. Particularly burdensome for writers who as a rule would never repeat a formula if they could help it.
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Oof. How terrible. And how much easier your marketing would be if you wanted to do that. (I'm assuming you don't want to, since you haven't.)
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