How and why good ideas turn into boring clichés
Terms like personal branding or infopreneurship sound good on paper. But why have they become swear words in the digital world? It's simple: popular ideas with lots of followers eventually turn into clichéd taboos. Let's break down how this happens.
Idea = Product
You came up with a concept for some aspect of digital, shared it with the world, and gained followers. Congratulations — you've launched a product!
Ideas work just like products: they're born, spread among users (the idea's 'customers'), develop an image, evolve, and eventually fade away. To 'sell' an idea, it must be 'packaged' and delivered to an audience. To keep it 'selling', you'll need to encourage its spread. Ideas can also be monetized — sometimes quite literally.
The idea life cycle
Ideas evolve much like tech products, following the 'diffusion of innovations' cycle. It has five distinct stages of audience adoption:
- Innovators: The creator makes the idea public, and a small group of loyal followers begins to use it. These early users work with the creator to refine the idea, hone its details, and share hacks.
- Early adopters: The idea gains visibility and attracts more followers. These pioneers prove its effectiveness, shape public opinion, and help spread the word. The idea begins to form its own mini-subculture.
- Early majority: As the pioneers normalize the idea, a broader, more risk-averse group adopts it. The idea becomes fully embedded in a subculture, but stereotypes — simplified and generalized impressions — begin to take hold.
- Late Majority: The skeptical masses reluctantly join in as the idea becomes a standard or classic. Stereotypes solidify.
- Laggards: The most conservative holdouts adopt the idea only when it becomes unavoidable — whether due to social pressure or workplace demands.
The decline into cliché
As long as the idea is in the hands of innovators and pioneers, it thrives. They understand the mechanics, analyze cause and effect, apply it thoughtfully, and build its reputation.
But when the early majority shows up, things start to change. A few adopters from the majority make the effort, learn the details, and use the idea effectively. A much larger group, however, fails to fully understand it. They misapply the idea — using it incorrectly, in the wrong context, or at the wrong time. The largest subgroup are the imitators. They notice the idea, barely familiarize themselves with it, and start mindlessly copying it.
This mass replication helps spread the idea far and wide, but at the expense of quality. The imitators become the majority, drowning out the voices of the innovators and pioneers. From the outside, the entire subculture appears to consist of these imitators.
The clumsy efforts of the imitators provoke irritation, and become memes. Eventually, the stereotype solidifies:
- Infopreneurship = scams and empty promises.
- Personal branding = obnoxiously shouting about yourself.
And just like that, a once great idea becomes a joke.