How to Brand Burnout

This relates tangentially to the marketing work I do in my day-to-day, but I am personally fascinated and passionate about how issues of work and its corporate commoditization intertwine to shape our lives, our beliefs, our consumption habits, our political leanings, our overall happiness, and our futures. [thanks for coming to my TED talk] 

You may have seen or shared the Buzzfeed article “How Millennial Became the Burnout Generation,” which sparked a lot of conversation back in January when it was published. Now the article’s author, Anne Helen Petersen, has written a follow-up about a company, Pattern, that has evolved since playing a crucial role in shaping “the look of some of the most prominent brands in today’s bourgeois millennial marketplace,” and how they’re examining their mistakes and in the process, reshaping the way a generation thinks about work, culture, life, politics, and consumption.

The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout

A little context, since these articles are long and we’re all busy:

Back in January, Petersen asked why she and her generation sometimes struggled to achieve basic tasks, affectionately known or disparaged as “adulting.” Rather than dismissing “adulting [as] hard because life is hard,” Petersen elevates a simmering conversation about the commoditization of every aspect of millennial life and how external social, political and economic forces influenced and degraded an entire age group that is too tired to meet people in person or go to the store to buy groceries. As she puts it, there are “myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace — first in school, then through secondary education — starting as very young children.” She explores the way that a generation groomed for “adulthood” and “careers” was suddenly steamrolled by the financial crisis and was left to “adult” for themselves without the opportunities to escape the ripple effects via economic and occupational means nor blessed with the social safety nets and public programs that older generations had [ok boomers].

There’s a lot more in the article but crucially, Petersen and other writers have focused on the role brands play in creating this environment, notably calling out WeWork’s utopian hustle culture that wraps workaholism in good vibes and ‘free booze.’ Other culprits range from fast casual options like Sweetgreen and Chipotle that have reshaped mealtime to make it more efficient and less social to skin care products that emphasize little moments of self-care in a busy world with $100 serums and minimalist labels. 

Pattern wants to change that.

In its previous incarnation, Pattern was a hip boutique digital marketing agency called Gin Lane, turning ‘uncool’ products and services into millennial lifestyle mainstays, like Sweetgreen, Harry’s, and HIMS. Now, they’re pivoting, taking into account that a lot of the brands they propelled with the goals of optimizing and supercharging millennial life may have had the opposite effect. If this shift has you saying WHAT THE FUCK, you’re not alone in identifying a crucial capitalist tendency and feeling wary. 

Pattern doesn’t follow the path it helped so many brands chart. Rather, it’s direction more closely resembles “that of a striving millennial: hard work followed by deep disillusionment and now, maybe, guarded optimism.” They’ve focused on making products that revel in moments of freedom and leisure that also make the rest of their audiences lives less stressful. Their first line, a home cookware set called Equal Parts, features high-quality products you wouldn’t mind showing off on Instagram. But the cookware isn’t the point. The larger ethos of Equal Parts focuses on cooking just to cook, and the joy that comes from routine-changing activities. 

Side note: I will add that a lot of this conversation, and Pattern’s target audience, is couched in affluent, white language, something that is addressed in a few places in the article. Looking at burnout, coping mechanisms, and the response for other audiences would be a fascinating and under examined line of inquiry.

Details are still vague about future products and the company is still relatively new, but here are a few takeaways and questions from the article on what Pattern has identified about the millennial condition, how they’re attempting to remedy it, how this approach will evolve, and how I believe it relates to the work that we do at Velocity:

• Find a hobby, for hobbies sake

  • “As millennials, we’ve been trained to do as much as possible, get into the best school possible, and that eliminates a lot of ‘unproductive’ free time,” Emmett Shine, Pattern’s founder, says. Setting goals or having incentives is certainly a good motivating factor, but when everything is tied to a large societal pressure or need, it clouds and distracts from purely doing something for its own sake.

• Let them co-opt

  • If this seems like co-opting…well it’s probably because it is. But Shine isn’t too worried. “More brands should totally be pivoting to having their marketing language talk about the role of the attention economy and workism and the endless amounts of human capital and personal optimization.”

  • Marketers debate whether they can authentically talk about an issue or join a conversation. While this raises flags, the novel approach and all-in strategy might not be as damaging as we’ve seen in the past.

• Is this different? And will it make a difference?

  • Haven’t brands done this before? Isn’t this the point of Deciem, Co.star, and Blue Apron? Maybe…but maybe making it explicit is a step in the right direction, rather than capitalizing on the insight that “millennials are burned out” and maneuvering into the millennial wallet as an “expensive burnout Band-Aid.” It’s refreshing to see a brand take it head-on.