Chicago’s massive Graceland Cemetery is home to the mausoleums of the business people and architects who rebuilt the city after the catastrophic fire of 1871 and made it what it is today. Their final resting place reveals a bravura and fearlessness that I’ve never seen before, anywhere.

From a massive pyramid guarded by an Egyptian sphinx and a Victorian angel, to a lavish Greek temple with twin sarcophagi on the edge of a lake, these people have left a lasting tribute to the risks they took in building, in one generation, massive business empires. Perhaps the only entrepreneurs of a similar ilk today, are the tech gods, of Bezos, Jobs and Gates.

Where is the next generation of entrepreneurs like these? Certainly not in the world of marketing. I can find few traces of people chancing their arm, betting the house or reaching for the sky. Instead they reach for ‘insights’.

I don’t think that Marshall Field or many of Graceland’s other businesspeople would have spent any time getting customers to tell them what to do. They knew instinctively what people would want. However, in the world of consumer brands, ‘insights’ remain king. They are the final determinant, the judge and jury and they leave the consumer as designer.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the OTC supermarket shelf. Here in the USA it is massive. In the heartburn medication category, three big brands you’ll find on every shelf are Pepcid, Tagamet and Zantac. Each is a different, brilliant and complex chemical formulation, but you wouldn’t believe it, looking at them.

The packaging design consists of largely the same wording, an oval shape, some blue, a fade and a picture of the tablet. How can three quite different products look so similar? It’s ‘insights’ being used as a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination.*

Perhaps this is a problem with todays’ world of marketing and design – you have the same clever people with the same education, using the same researchers, asking the same questions…and getting the same answers back. They then do exactly what those answers tell them, with the same lazy agencies.

When everything looks and says the same, then consumers will default to the brand that is supported most, or the one that is cheapest. Being like your competitor leads to a race to the bottom.

Now, I have no objection to finding out what people think about packaging, but I do object to consumers designing the packs for us – that’s the job of the design agency. Sadly many agencies, often the big ones with a machine to feed, are happy to let this happen because they are big and can’t fight the fight for brave, engaging ideas.

I sense that those occupants of Graceland’s green and tranquil ground would be turning in their graves at the lack of what Adam Morgan of Eat Big Fish fame calls ‘kickers and denters’ in marketing and design today. It’s time to start a campaign against lazy branding.

Perhaps someone can help me here, but I’ve never quite understood why we message people when it’s quicker and more efficient to call. Messaging is about as cranky as a typewriter, yet it’s been calculated that in 2013, we sent more than 300 billion text and instant messages. I realise there a real difference between a call and an instant message in terms of need and content, but their massive usage illustrates a perverse form of remoteness. We’re communicating more than ever with those around us, but in a detached way – on our own terms.

Thanks to Facebook, I know more about my relatives in Canada, Australia and Poland than ever before. I know what their kids look like, I’ve seen baby’s first stool (literally) what they had for breakfast and where they went on holiday, but mixed in with these intimate moments are ads for dropping belly flab and invitations to participate in trials for cardiovascular drugs. When I’m trying to get close, I’m being interrupted by unwanted ads and reminded what a poor replacement Facebook is for real contact. I can’t be myself because others are watching. Not everyone on Facebook is really my friend (see Adam Grant’s brilliant article ‘You’re Not My Friend’ http://tinyurl.com/lfeqj29). Again, I’m close but still remote. Communicating on my own terms, but keeping stuff back.

This is the problem for advertisers. They have so much data about us that they’re suffering from infobesity, but they still can’t get close to us because we won’t let them. It’s as though they can see a very good, clear jigsaw of us, but some of the key parts are missing.

This lack of real connection with consumers is exacerbated by what the life of a marketer is like nowadays. The modern office has been transformed in 25 years. In spite of all the fancy named breakout rooms and coffee zones, ‘Marketing’ is enveloped in a world of limitless data and supplicant suppliers. Procurement vets and edits out anyone bonkers, so marketers hardly have to move from their desks anymore. When they go out, it’s to a conference where they’re flesh-pressed by every halitosis ridden professional networker, but it doesn’t help them get close to people who do, or might buy their products.

My first job was as a designer at Sainsbury’s. My weekend fun was going to the store in Aylesbury and watching people buy my packs. Sad, I know, but it was an education that’s never left me. What had I done that made them buy my designs? With this in mind, a few years ago, I ran a workshop with a global foods business to try to get them to understand what consumers saw. We gave them $25 each and sent them to three supermarkets to buy products in categories they didn’t operate in. It turned out that they never went to the supermarket during work time – it’s as off limits as sitting at your desk just thinking.

These marketers bought much of their food from the staff shop and were astonished at how similar the products they bought in the supermarket were. They stopped customers and asked why they chose one product over another and came back genuinely exhilarated. It’s odd really isn’t it? One of the world’s great joys is people-watching, but it’s not seen as part of someone in marketing’s education or role.

Similarly, a home visit, a rifle through someone’s freezer, cupboards and bathroom cabinets or an ethnographic exercise filming people shopping, buying and using products will tell you more than you could ever imagine from a Powerpoint deck of data.

You just can’t beat hands on, face-to-face, watching, chatting and listening. The sort of thing we do in our spare time really.

In October, I’m turning 65. When I’m stopped by a researcher at Heathrow, as I always am and asked what my age is, I’ll be in the last group: ‘65+’. I’m no longer very interesting. I’m not ‘youth’, nor up and coming, or even a regular business traveller anymore. I’m just, what a client recently referred to as a ‘Good-lifer’, a target for walk in baths and Michael Parkinson’s free biro if I buy a funeral plan. I’m 15 years into Saga already. It couldn’t be bleaker.

Unwittingly, I’ve also joined a list of consumers who have special needs. We’re so old that we can’t open packaging with the dexterity that others can and we can’t read said packaging without taking out our specs. I was asked recently by a very well meaning business, if WMH would be interested in helping them create packaging design rules for brands that are aimed at retired people and it was this question that prompted this blog.

Do older/retired people eat different brands to younger people anymore? We’ve all got our own teeth nowadays. I see little difference between my fridge and that of my 33 years old daughter and I see her struggle with reading and opening packaging rather more than I do.

Whilst packaging does a very decent job of making the most of pallet space and supermarket shelf capacity and we have much to thank it for freshness, current packaging is generally dreadful. It is rife with stuff I don’t want, or need, to know and short on the things that really matter.

Some years ago we ran a project for a global foods business from the US, to help them explain what’s good about their products to consumers. Of course, our initial reaction was that convenience food was just old fashioned junk and irredeemably bad. Once we’d stopped being so up ourselves, it became very clear that millions of people around the world have a great need for convenience food. They don’t have the time nor the money to be scratch cooks, even if they’d like to. They’re getting by the best way they can. However, they all want to serve their family decent and healthy food that they can enjoy.

The odd thing is that food manufacturers forget to tell them things they want to know, like ‘What’s a preservative? What’s gum? Why are they in this product? How and where is it made and by whom?’ In most cases, the impression is that convenience food is made by accountants.

The things that matter to us, retired or not are mostly the same and we want to know more not less. It’s as though ‘back of pack’ should become ‘front of pack’. Tell us what we want and need to know and do it so we can all read it (spectacles are not the preserve of an aging population) and stop telling us things we already know or stuff we just don’t believe.

A typical example is the four Spaghetti Bolognese ready meals shown below. They all seem to have been flung together without a thought about what they are saying to people. Knowledge is sacrificed on the altar of logo and ‘appetite appeal’. I want to know, who made these products – who’s hand has been upon them? What do they contain and why? Why is Asda’s range called ‘Chosen by you” – what’s the story behind that?

It’s as meaningless as ‘Your M&S’ – no, it’s not my M&S, it belongs to a load of shareholders who wish M&S would focus on getting the product right rather than marketing Newspeak. In the case of the Spaghetti Bolognese, it’s pointless graphics that misses a great opportunity to talk about care in sourcing, decent ingredients and healthy consumption. We patronise the less well off by thinking they are drawn to big pictures of food with some steam on, or a bogus Italian scene.

Once we’ve bought it, manufacturers need to make sure that packaging is a pleasure to open and use. It’s an old chestnut, I know, but I was told recently that a client’s biggest innovation in the last twenty years was a re-sealable pack. Really? In the time that Dyson has reinvented the vacuum cleaner, you’ve come up with a pack that reseals?

How is it that yoghurt pots, milk cartons, sauce jars, toothpaste dispensers, razor blades, liquid soap, chocolate bars and many, many more products that have adorned our cupboards for the last century, remain beastly to open and use for everyone? They are made in the cheapest possible way to run down the line, be stacked and sold with scant consideration for the end user. Again, having trouble opening a pack is not the preserve of older consumers, it is a nuisance to anyone who buys and uses products every day.