GUO
GRAPHIC BRANDING
PUBLICATION Publication Cover Design
ILLUSTRATION
KNOW MORE ABOUT NOVELTY SEEKING
The promotion of novelty
The promotion of novelty is first discussed in the context of the material economy, where the media industry began to flourish. Novel brands such as cigarette and alcohol brands, successfully elaborated their audiences by promoting novel experiences (Hendlin, Anderson & Glantz, 2010). Meanwhile, film and print media provide channels to advertise and emphasise novelty, which has caused an astonishing impact on elevating purchasing power in the commercial market (Tungate, 2007).
Stepping into the era of information, where the advent of the attention economy occurs, followers and likes became the object of competition among brands (Goldhaber, 1997). The relationship between customers and brands has changed, as the crowd has become more proactive in seeking novelty (Sugandini, 2018). When information stays easily accessible, media and brands urgently need to find ways to capture and maximize attention. Regarding the situation, Craig Mawdsley, Strategy Officer at AMV BBDO, summed up the marketing concept - ‘weaponizing boredom’.The application of this strategy is where brands lure consumers to pursue novelty by emphasizing the intolerance of boredom, to attract every trivial attention (Mawdsley, 2019).
Contemporary novel brands including media platforms such as YouTube and Netflix, as well as social platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, all exploit the idea of weaponizing boredom. Regarding the young generation as their main audience, the brands claim to provide the audience with 'infinite' excitement, attempting to increase user engagement with constantly updated content (Henderson, 2020). To maximize profits, the goal of novel brands is never just to become popular. Tristan Harris, CEO of Netflix stated in his speech: ’Our biggest competitors are YouTube, Facebook and sleep’ (Hern, 2017). Capturing trivial attention in leisure moments was not enough anymore, the ideal position that novel brands envision is to take hold of every moment in life. As the relationship between boredom and novelty becomes more antagonistic, the image of boredom leaves only an unpleasant impression in the eyes of the young generation.
Addictive novelty seeking and Media Fatigue
The strategy of 'weaponizing boredom' reveals the real aim of novel brands to induce addiction in users, so they grow a dependency on their products. They have indeed been successful. In a saturated market where people are being bombarded with options (novels, 2022), being guided by their genetic instinct of novelty seeking (Arenas & Manzanedo, 2016), as well as the purposeful influence of novel brands (Tavares, 2006), people gradually adapt excessive novelty-seeking behaviour.
In Dr Sandi Mann's experiments on boredom intolerance, it was noted that indulging in behaviours such as browsing social media, short videos, etc., to avoid being bored only makes people more prone to boredom (Mann, 2016). Meanwhile, many of those who adopted addictive novelty-seeking behaviours find themselves suffering from different levels of distress. Younger generations are particularly prominent among the group since they are most exposed to novel content (Zomorodi, 2017) (Soleymani et al., 2019).
The phenomenon of developing tiredness and anxiety due to online socializing is regarded as media fatigue, which is also a form of brain overload (Gerard, 2017). This pathological term has also been discussed by various scholars, which suggested that boredom proneness and information overload have strong connections, and could trigger and worsen social media fatigue (Whelan, 2019).
As people today fall more and more frequently into the cycle of novelty seeking to become restless and anxious from over-indulgence, they fail to realise that what fuels this behaviour is their escape from boredom (Mann, 2016).
*This article is one part of my graduation essay, Can boredom become the novel?