I saw an interesting comment from the marketing gent Rory Sutherland. He calls it metric driven isomorphism. In other words, by collecting the same demographic data and redesigning products, all companies in the market tend toward some boring center that addresses the main needs/wants but reduces differentiation.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard it called a lot of things, catering to the masses, least common denominator etc. It's really only a problem when it starts to consume so many resources in a given ecosphere that it pushes out everything else.
It's like a Times Square effect, Times Square used to be an actual interesting place, now it's just the bastard child of commercialization. It's happening or has already happened in most major cities and of course suburbs in the US. There's few holdouts, like Nashville, New Orleans and Atlanta that still are just somewhat untamable.
