blessed are the cheesemakers

Not meant to be taken literally. It, of course, refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.

Except perhaps not all cheesemakers are equal.

I've read and re-read this recent article from the New York Times regarding the artisan cheese boutiques of New York.

The writer observes that 'some of the most amusing and captivating writing in the city is being produced in the service of cheese.'

For instance see the labels below scribed by Martin Johnson, manager of Gastronomie 491, a market and cafe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.



His rock'n'roll description of Calcagno, an Italian sheep cheese is particularly fetching.

“Big and floral in the very best way possible, this firm Sardinian sheep has the cool unaffected strut of Mick in his prime, Lou in middle age or Polly Jean today.”

From the marketers point of view we should note that in a commoditised market with many similar choices then a simple way to differentiate is to simply have a better story.

Particularly if the story allows the buyer to tell themselves they have made a better choice, and gives them a reason to tell other people how smart/cool/in-the-know they are.

So the cheese buying journey is certainly another one whereby standard economic theory of the c*nsumer, armed with full information, doing cost-benefit analysis and making rational decisions in their own self-interest goes right out the window.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College and author of (essential reading) 'The Paradox of Choice', calls this outsourcing connoisseurship.

“Many people want the patina of connoisseurship on the cheap, so they contract out the decision-making process. [this way] you get the benefits of discernment without paying the psychological price of having to make difficult choices and distinctions. You’re happy because you’ve been told what to get and don’t know any better.”

Indeed Steve Jenkins, the cheese 'expert' at Fairway Market remarks...

'The customer has no idea what he or she wants, the customer is dying to be told what they want.”.

Perhaps that's a slightly skewed view - as with social media 'experts', cheese experts display symptoms of a somewhat subjective validation - but there can no doubt that in this instance the cheese buying process is a highly social one, and one which falls into both the copying of 'experts' bucket and also the peer-copying category.

Those who are prone to outsourcing their connoisseurship of cheese will without doubt outsource their connoisseurship in many other categories.

Schwartz also notes that '...people become paragons of taste simply by taking someone else’s advice'.

Indeed, in my record shop days we routinely employed a similar tactic, and wrote detailed descriptions of the latest US or Italian imports on stickers attached to the sleeves.

('116bpm funk guitar led balearic chunky chugger peppered with JB horns, Chas'n'Dave keys and Doobie Brothers riffs - massive Pelican Club tune! - there will be a prize for the reader who can identify that one)

As the title of the post is from Life of Brian it's seems apt to finish with another much quoted excerpt.

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!

Crowd: [in unison] Yes! We're all individuals!

Brian: You're all different!

Crowd: [in unison] Yes, we are all different!

Man in crowd: I'm not...

Crowd: Shhh!

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to be perfectly frank

I don't know if Frank Sinatra ever wrote a song in his puff.

But it's hard to argue that as an artist his blues-inflected saloon balladeer ouvre (particularly his mid-50's period circa 'Only The Lonely') pretty much wrote the book of sharp American masculine cool, and with significant sex, style, subversion and skill to boot.

Sinatra's ability to interpret a song, and take it somewhere else was his art.

It was not necessary to have been the originator of the material.

As a young guitar slinger in the early 80's I was the principle tunesmith in several bands.

(None of these particularly 'made it' but that's not what the story is about.)

I was a fan of the hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David for a time, but the prolific nature of that partnership meant there were literally hundreds of their songs that I was not familiar with.

So to write tunes for my band I would often pull out the Bacharach-David songbook, pick a tune a didn't know and use the chords to make up my own tune.

I couldn't read music so all I had to go on were the chord shapes.

So nine times out of ten I'd end up with something new based on 'copying' Burt and Hal.

In advertising we idealise and revere the novelty or originality of ideas and insights.

In fact, we relentlessly pursue the 'new', almost at all costs.

We hold aloft the stuff that proclaims 'this has never been done before'.

Really this is the true advertising conceit.
If we are honest, advertising has routinely hi-jacked, jumped upon or otherwise adopted and commercialized existing cultural ideas since day one.
That’s what it does, and that’s why it works.

But is new always better?

I've no qualms at all about adopting an insight from somewhere else and applying it to the particular problem I'm looking at.

I've equally no qualms about adopting the basis of an idea that may have been used somewhere else and improving it.

Because, and I’ll quote enfant terrible of le Nouvelle Vague, Jean Luc Godard here, it's not where something comes from that's important, it's where it goes to.

Novelty is over-rated, to be perfectly frank.

We don't always need new, just better.

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