The Specialness of a “Collection”

When I was a kid we only had cake in the house on someone’s birthday.  It was always a cake made out of box with frosting made from a mix too.  Something that would now be considered nothing special, but the fact that there was cake was the thing that made it special, and the birthday.  For kids I know now, having a cake is an everyday occurrence, or at least expected.  The specialness of it has been overrun by the everydayness.  No one pays any attention to the average.

Target has really hit on the way to take the ho-hum out of the unexciting with the brilliant marketing campaign of the “Everyday Collection.”  I don’t know if my friend Jeff Jones, the CMO of Target, came up with this idea, but I will give him credit.  “Collections” are special and he has elevated the mundane things like diapers and paper towels to a new level by calling them part of the “Everyday Collection” at least at Target.  Those same things are not part of a collection at any other store and so don’t you want to get them only at Target?

The psychology of special makes us like something more than we normally would.  If we can be desensitized to the specialness of having a cake around we can be resentistized to the average being elevated.  It all has to do with our perception.

This can work for eating healthy food too.  Rather than calling something a “diet food,” with all the depriving connotations those words conjure up, I am going to call my daily salad part of my “Svelte Collection.”  Who doesn’t want to be svelte?  Makes you want to run right over to my house and have that oil-free salad.

Marketing has been a big part of the diet industry for years.  You don’t think that the Palm Beach Diet would have been as successful if it were named the Pine Bluff, Arkansas Diet?  When you close your eyes and think of Palm Beach beautiful and thin people like CZ Guest come to mind.

So market the good things to yourself.  Rename and reframe the ordinary, typical and dull as something new and exciting.  Make things special again, even if it comes out of a box.