“the Joanna-Gaines-ification of marketing.”

An essay by a frustrated marketing human.

Pretty stuff kind of sucks. By “pretty” I don’t mean aesthetically pleasing, I still want there to be some care and intentionality into visual things that are created. What I mean is that that most corporate branding and marketing feels boring and vanilla nowadays, and it seems like many smaller brands are unfortunately following suit. We all have access to tools that make graphic and web design easier than ever, which on one hand is nice since the barrier to entry has been lowered for brands wanting to get their name out there. But with these tools have come standard, minimalist, “clean” and pretty templates that are presumed to be the gold standard by many. Everywhere you look, brands have insisted on a safe, minimalist and “perfect” visual style to represent their product that’s aesthetically low-friction. And it sucks. Yeah it’s easy to just use a template that does the design work for you, or “use our new AI feature to build your website and logo in 3 clicks” but almost everyone seems to be doing that and wants to put on the appearance of perfection.

I’ve seen a few nicknames for this trend-towards-the-bland, my favorite among them being “blanding” (instead of “branding”). But I like making up names so I want to call it the “Joanna-Gaines-ification” of marketing. Remember Chip and Joanna Gaines from the show “Fixer Upper?” Of course you do, everyone watched the show and everyone (including me for awhile) loved what Joanna Gaines did for interior design. But therein lies a problem… Everyone emulated the Joanna Gaines look and thus killed its uniqueness. So now instead of being a gold standard it’s been distorted into something that comes off as lifeless, cold, not lived in, and OH MY GOD if I see “live laugh love” in metal cursive letters mounted on distressed white shiplap walls one more time I’m going to shave my legs with a spork.

What happened to the jank? What happened to the vibrant colors and chaos and imperfect human elements? I’m sure there are dozens of good answers as to why everything is trending toward the direction of portraying flawlessness but it’s a trend we’re actively pushing back against at Iron Horse. It’s inauthentic, overdone and tastes like unsalted chicken.

I miss the crazy Taco Bell color scheme. I miss when companies had hand-written logos instead of some basic ass variation of a minimalist sans font. I miss the chaotic energy of MySpace profile themes and what the internet used to look like before everything tried to look like a digital version of the Apple store. I miss see-through plastics on Game Boys and I miss when companies had distinct personalities instead of obviously hiring a marketing team that’s very good at emulating what bigger, prettier brands have done already for years.

Brewing is dirty work. It’s gross sometimes, stuff is sticky, fermenting is a gnarly process, machines break, the person fixing the broken machine is going to bleed in the process, and you’d be bold to wear something white while heading to a day of work at the brewery. Unless you’re a pretty little princess like me, I work in marketing so my work mostly involves computers and cameras. I can wear white but the production people are going to spit their chew into my mocha if I do so I refrain nonetheless.

All that to say, it’d be unnatural to try and represent the brewery as this glamorous thing where all the machines are well-oiled, the beer pours perfectly and look beautiful against the sunset, and the production crew only talks about their favorite Disney movies. Be bold (ironically this was also a cursive-lettered metal sign I saw Joanna Gaines put on a wall once). To play it safe, when it comes to brand imagery and brand voice, is a conscious decision to blend in and I don’t think that’s what you want to do in today’s market. You don’t need to be aggressive or offensive, you just need to say and do something a little wild and different than the rest, assuming it’s authentic to what you perceive your brand’s personality to be.

So we’re going to refrain from the pretty. We still care about appearances, sure, but we care in this way. We care to be authentic and intentional with how we more accurately depict what “Iron Horse Brewery” really looks and sounds like. And if you just got here because you skipped to the bottom of the page and didn’t want to read a full ranty blog, here’s the condensed version of what I just said above:

Joanna Gaines taught the world what shiplap is and we ate that shit up way too hard.

-Riley Schmit