When The AGA Hits The Fan

Anyone who gives consumerism a nanosecond’s thought will be aware of the importance of freshly invented needs that give freshly invented products niches to fill.

I like to sum it up as, ‘Answering the questions no-one was asking.’

I want to get three invented needs off my chest and while I’m at it offer some friendly advice to a famous domestic appliance manufacturer.

I’ll start with proximity-sensing-liquid-soap-dispensers: Obviously for those of us who are using too few batteries around the house. The justification for this ‘invention’ is that a normal pump that you might (shiver) come into contact with harbours killer germs and bacteria. First of all, I haven’t died much yet and I don’t think it’s just the luck of having only ever used clean soap dispenser buttons that has kept me alive. This product is so pointless its existence actually cancels itself out. Essentially, it is admitting that it doesn’t work, “This soap is so crap it won’t help remove the germs you get on your thumb after pressing the top of the pump-pack.”

Next, Glade and Ambi Pur and any other manufacturers of whiffy things. This niche reaches its moronic apotheosis in the motion-tracking-air-freshener department. A real bubble came off the top of the think-tank that day. Plus their ads are unforgivably American. The badly lip-synced Australian voices over the top are not fooling anyone, and I have never seen a house of that interior design in Australia. I have never seen four women, one of them an African-American who’s not Marcia Hines, dressed like that in Australia. Even the film/video quality is instantly recognisable as American. Go away you stinky Americans. Ponginess is not a national problem of ours.

Lastly, one that’s in a slightly different category. It’s the one that makes me a bit sad as well as angry. This product could have a place in our lives if it was just properly defined: The Dyson fan. (Pictured) It makes me angry because someone thought that rather than calling it a “fan”, they should call it an “Air Multiplier”. I want to meet this person and introduce them to a cricket bat or, as the Grey Area Marketing Department call it, a “Bruise Multiplier”.

It makes me angry because they have invented a need that is so ridiculous, it’s kind of post-ironic. Apparently, the Dyson Air Multiplier is saving us from the ‘buffeting’ our normal fans put us through. I want to meet the person who has suffered buffeting from a standard fan and take them out to a buffet lunch. Or as the Grey Area Marketing Dept call it, “Surf and Turf You Off Something High”.

It also makes me sad because I will stand by our Dyson vacuum cleaner and say that it is a really good bit of kit, but they have tarnished the brand by being so spectacularly stupid.

I reckon if they’d been more honest about it, I know that a few of us would have had a completely different reaction.

Why not this approach:

Look, it’s a fan! It doesn’t do anything much more than a normal fan does, but just look at it! It’s the kind of industrial design that gets remembered. You know the Alessi lemon squeezer and the VW Beetle? Of course you do. Well, neither of them were spectacularly good at their stated tasks but they were the kind of thing that it was a pleasure to be around. They were fun for your eyes. It’s the kind of thing that says, “Not everything has to be the most efficient or powerful or the best way to get there. How about beauty for beauty’s sake? Oh, and it sort of does the job in a magical, invisible kind of way.”

I like a bit of whimsical stuff around the house. In fact, I take the safety guards completely off fans I own because it looks a whole lot better, it makes them quieter, they stay cleaner and I like the sense of daring. Emergency Contact looked on in horror the first time she saw me do this and predicted mayhem. I was breaking some sacred domestic covenant. But I think if you’re silly enough to insert yourself into a spinning blade, you don’t deserve the limbs you were issued with. (I should also point out that up to a certain size and power, domestic fans cannot take your finger off, no matter how inventively you stick them in. Don’t ask me how I know that.) But, my point is that the fan looks good and basically does the job – and there is a genuine need for a fan in our little flat, come a Sydney summer.

So Dyson, pick your game up, call it what it is – a bit of good looking industrial design for the desperately fashionable – and watch your sales go through the roof... or the Rain Diffuser... whatever. Don’t pretend it was answering any crushing need other than aesthetic.