Do consumers care about timeless design?
Designers prize timelessness, but consumers don’t measure a product’s value that way. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl argues that what customers actually want is familiarity without fatigue, and that the memories driving it often come from the cultural zeitgeist rather than personal experience. He uses Round Table Pizza and the agency Tavern’s revival of Sizzler to show how repeated exposure builds the familiarity that gives people confidence in a brand. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on timelessness, What the F*ck Is Timelessness?.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl starts with an uncomfortable truth: the job of brand strategists and designers is to help clients make more money. That makes it essential to ask what timelessness means to consumers, and his answer is that they largely don’t care about timeless design.
What consumers respond to, he says, is familiarity without fatigue: enough recognizable elements to feel understood and remembered, without forcing them to figure out something completely new. Timelessness is always tied to memory, and those memories may not be personal. They can come from a brand’s place in the wider zeitgeist, as with his mental picture of Round Table Pizza, a place he’s never been.
He points to the agency Tavern’s rebrand of Sizzler as a model. By digging up the original logo and old advertising and modernizing the world around them, Tavern tapped familiarity built over generations, even among people who have never eaten there.
Highlights
The job of branding is ultimately to help clients make more money.
Consumers don’t judge value by timelessness.
What they want is familiarity without fatigue.
Brand memories often come from the zeitgeist, not personal experience.
Tavern’s Sizzler rebrand modernized classic elements to revive old familiarity.
Key insights
Familiarity without fatigue
Customers want enough recognizable cues to feel at home, with room for newness. How far a brand can push that newness is a question of how much fatigue its audience will tolerate.
Timelessness runs on memory
Memory comes from years or generations of investment, which Calvin calls the safest way to build timelessness.
Memories can be borrowed
People hold impressions of brands they’ve never used. A brand’s job is to keep affirming those culturally shared memories.
Familiarity builds confidence
Repeated exposure creates familiarity, and familiarity is at the core of a customer’s confidence that something good is going on.
Detailed analysis
The clip shifts timelessness from a designer’s ideal to a consumer’s experience. Customers aren’t evaluating whether a logo will age well; they’re reacting to whether a brand feels known. That makes accumulated memory, personal or cultural, the real asset.
The Sizzler example shows how to use that asset. Rather than starting over, a revival can pull forward the elements people already associate with the brand and update everything around them.
Conclusion
Consumers don’t care about timelessness for its own sake. Calvin’s point is that they care about familiarity, and brands that respect the memories people already hold can build confidence without becoming stale.
Transcript
I think one other thing we also always need to remember is that, in the end, our job as brand strategists, as designers, all of these things, is to help our clients make more money. It’s very uncomfortable. I feel like we often don’t like to talk about it like that, but that is our job. And so what we then have to ask is, what does timelessness mean to consumers and customers? And I think, honestly, consumers largely do not give a [bleep] about the idea of timeless design. It’s just not how they measure the value of a product.
I think what consumers are really looking for from the experience of timelessness—they’re not measuring it in timelessness. I think they’re measuring it more in the idea that it provides familiarity without fatigue. And what I mean by familiarity without fatigue is there are just enough elements that are recognizable about the brand that they understand it and they have memories attached to it, but it doesn’t push them to the point of having to figure out something completely new, something completely novel. And I think there’s leeway in that: how far you can push that newness, how much you can test the bounds of that fatigue with a customer.
But it is worth remembering that when you start talking about timelessness, timelessness is always related to memory. And memory comes from years of investment, generations of investment over time. That’s the safest way to generate timelessness. But one thing that’s really important to remember is that the memories a person has about a brand may not actually even be their own memories. Their memories might just be created from a larger perception of the brand that exists in the zeitgeist. We all have opinions about a lot of brands that we don’t have specific personal attachment to, or even personal experience with, but we have some knowing and understanding of their brand on a large-scale zeitgeist, cultural consciousness level. And our job as a brand is to keep affirming that memory that they might have heard of.
I mean, the other day I went by—I don’t even know if they really exist anymore—an old abandoned Round Table location. I’ve never been to a Round Table Pizza, but I can see it in my mind. I can experience it in my mind. I think of a certain type of place, a buffet, all those kinds of things. I’m definitely going to talk about Pizza Hut in just a minute, because that’s a place that I have been. But I don’t know anything about the Round Table Pizza brand, and there is something that has been established inside my mind. Round Table’s due for a comeback, right? They’ve got to be coming back. Does anyone in chat know if Round Table Pizza actually exists? There used to be one down the street by the bar that I go to regularly, but it’s been gutted in the last couple years.
So I think the important thing from the consumer perspective is that repeated exposure to a brand starts creating that familiarity, and familiarity is at the core of confidence building.
Oh, Sarah’s in here: “They’re still out there. They’re just in the [unclear].” Okay. All right. Sarah, let’s go to a Round Table Pizza someday. Or Aaron, let’s do a company trip to a Round Table. I don’t think we’ve ever done a Parliament trip to a buffet. Maybe that’s a thing we need to do.
Okay, so that’s kind of what timelessness means to consumers. I’d be curious if anyone can think of other old classic brands like Round Table Pizza. I feel like there’s a ton of brands like that that are ready for a renewal. If there’s anything you can think of, throw them in the chat.
Because I love one recently. Tavern, an agency in New York—I’ve been loving everything they’re doing. They just redid Sizzler’s brand, and talk about a brand that no one has thought of in forever. They did a great job at digging up their heritage, going back. I’ll just pull that up really fast while I’m talking about it. They did such a good job at modernizing, but also pulling back a bunch of classic elements from Sizzler.
So this is the Tavern website. Love the way they think about this stuff. I know I’ve talked about their stuff a lot. They did the Hyperblast energy drink, the energy booze that I’ve talked about a lot. But they did a really good job of going back, digging up the original logo, taking a bunch of different elements from past old advertisements, and then modernizing the world around it, which I think is really critical to how you bring back that timelessness for a brand.
I mean, look at this. This is incredible. I want to go to this place so bad. Some surf and turf. So they pulled out all these old advertisements with this weird fuzzy logo version. All this stuff. It’s great. Oh god. All brown food. Maybe we don’t need to go to Sizzler. My diet and health life is falling off just looking at this stuff. Incredible work.
But I think this is such a great example. A lot of us have not even been to a Sizzler, because they haven’t been super relevant in decades. But I think we all have something rooted in our mind that has created familiarity over generations. And that’s at the core of confidence. Now that it looks nice and new and still has these old pieces, I’m very interested, because that familiarity gives me confidence that something good’s going on there.