Text: A bullet-pointed list reading “Crystal Pepsi, Watermelon Oreos, Frito-Lay Lemonade, Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water, Colgate Kitchen Entrees, Cheetos Lip Balm, Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancake-Wrapped Sausage, Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo.”

These are all real products, but the list does read almost exactly like one of those “I fed a million junk food marketing campaigns into an AI and it spat these out” posts. Putting “Touch of Yogurt Shampoo” at the end was genius. 

The article it comes from is super interesting – it’s about “harbinger” consumers, people who habitually purchase goods that are destined for failure. They found that not only are there specific people whose purchasing habits repeat this trend over and over, but they tend to cluster in specific zip codes. 

They have several explanations for these buying habits. Poverty pops up early on since often “flop” products are deeply discounted, but they also found consumers who simply had different “niche” tastes, people who like to try weird things, and people who maybe didn’t realize they were living in the Failed Product version of Stepford – my favorite quote was the example “Everyone in my town used to eat Colgate dinner entrees. It wasn’t until I later moved that I realized that was kind of strange.”

From a marketing standpoint it’s interesting, because you can trial new products in these zip codes as well as in your regular test markets and compare the data. But also in a larger, less craven social sense, it means that we’re now basically capable of identifying social outliers by their purchasing patterns, which has some potentially troubling implications.