Influencer-branded consumer goods offer glossier branding than actual quality.

Evidence

This coincided with the dominance of what writer and consultant Venkatesh Rao described in 2017 as “premium mediocre”—products for which the idea was much glossier than the execution. The canonical example was gourmet cupcakes. As Amanda Mull observed in The Atlantic: “I remain unconvinced that anyone ever took genuine pleasure in eating a dry, fist-size Crumbs Bake Shop cupcake topped with a mountain of hardened buttercream.” A major source for premium mediocre goods emerged from influencers’ monetization strategies. They partnered with private-label manufacturers to slap their name on commodities as cash grabs. One firm, Masteroast, provided beans for over a thousand coffee brands, with the labels simply picking from a series of diagnostic codes to find the right formula. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 648

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘premium mediocre’ precisely, a key term in Marx’s argument about the era’s consumer culture.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘death of the sellout’ theme and omnivore monoculture — this is a concrete mechanism producing flattened, branded sameness.