Decoding the Retail Rebrand

Imagine a time machine in which a traveler from 1976 visits 2026. When he learns that tonight “We’re going to that millennial place at the lifestyle center with great wraps,” he wouldn’t know if the family was going to the hospital, a sci-fi movie, or the metro. Yet today’s traveler who went back to 1976 would have no trouble understanding, “We’re going to the Mexican restaurant that all the kids like at the shopping center.”

One of the quirks of our information age is that the changes in the vocabulary used to describe retail and dining have outpaced the changes in retail itself. The 24/7 information cycle has produced not so much a marketplace of information, but rather a marketplace of labels: some clever, some corny, always changing, and frequently unnecessary. Social media certainly doesn’t help, frequently suggesting that something old is new when, in fact, it is simply being rebranded.

Dining establishments that were once rated on a universally understood scale of 1 to 5 have been redefined in contemporary parlance as “chef-driven,” “elevated,” “hand-crafted,” “farm-to-table,” and “artisanal.” Did restaurants really change that much, or just the way that we describe them? More importantly, does “elevated” mean 3 stars or 4?

When you pay close attention, some of the rebranding of traditional goods and services feels like a consumer I.Q. test. A case in point: a Walmart advertisement touting its e-commerce business highlighted that purchases made online could be delivered to your home, or available through “free in-store pickup.” Wait a minute… hasn’t in-store pickup always been free? Who’s fooling whom here?

Shopping centers themselves were already broadly categorized into neighborhood centers, power centers, and malls. A newer so-called class of assets are open-air centers, a name which makes as much sense to me as sunlight centers. Aren’t all centers in the open air? How does this label help? Yet another new label: experiential centers. A name that implies that the asset differentiates itself from other shopping centers which… do not offer the consumer a shopping experience? Methinks not.

While the staples of restaurant cuisine remain largely unchanged—burgers, tacos, pizza, etc.—yesteryear’s familiar fare has been recoined with labels like “sliders,” “street food,” “wraps,” and “freezes.” Similarly perplexing are the names used to describe the restaurants themselves. I still can’t tell you the difference between casual dining, fast-casual, fast-fine and quick-service. Does anyone actually eat at a ghost kitchen? Isn’t a gastropub just a restaurant that sells beer? Aren’t tapas what we used to call appetizers?

Finally, I could not hope to tell you the difference between a trattoria and an osteria. But I found it rather amusing that when I searched online for osteria, my computer tried to spell-check me to “hysteria.” “A state of extreme upset.” How fitting.