a little insight (for me)

My wife & I were at Westfield Mall this last weekend to see a movie and afterwards she wanted a little time to shop. Since there is almost nothing at the mall that I can use (or fits me or interests me), I got to looking at the store layouts and how they brand and market their products. There’s always something that I can learn from the Big Boys to use at Furniture Works. The first thing I noticed was the similarity of the efforts. Most stores show a clean, sparse and urban look to them. At first, I was disappointed. I thought how sad that everyone should aspire to exactly the same image. Then I got to looking at the people themselves and I brightened up. The customers (you & I) come in much more interesting variety and styles than the stores were pushing. This tells me that folks are really spending some quality time in the decisions they make about how they want to dress and present themselves (assuming, of course, that unlike me, folks weren’t just wearing whatever clean clothes they had).

This gave me the optimistic push that the world is really a much more interesting place than the limited view that marketers make for their customers. There’s plenty of room for each of us to be ourselves…and ourselves don’t have to be like everyone else. Variety may be more than the spice of life, it may be what makes life worth living.