Its body is velvety. When one of its ears is pressed, it sings a foot-tapping cowboy song. Pressing its other ear gets it neighing. While singing or neighing, it moves its jaws and wags its bushy tail. It is a brown-and-white-coloured rocking horse with a slew of fancy features. There are other equine options at this toy shop in George Town. One rocking horse has a pink velvety body and strands of curly pink hair frame its forehead. It is obviously aimed at little girls who fancy curls and pink. I am buying a rocking horse for my three-year-old daughter, and I am drawn to the pink horse. It however strikes me as fragile. Every model out there is in fact flimsy and ridiculously lightweight.
After careful inspection, I settle on a unisex horse that looks sturdier than the rest. It has all the add-ons — and that’s what will interest my daughter. Before packing the purchase, the salesman cautions me, “It’s for kids aged up to five years. It cannot withstand the weight of older children.”
As I was returning home with the purchase, I remembered the rocking horse that would monopolise a corner in my paternal grandfather’s house. It was an old wooden horse, sturdy and heavy.
Whenever I visited my grandpa, I would drag the horse out to an open space and ‘go riding’. It gave me the glorious illusion of mobility and adventure. It was a family heirloom that had lasted many decades and had enthralled many little hearts. Nobody was ever cautioned against rough use of the rocking horse. It was built to take on extra weight and withstand abuse.
These two rocking horses — one, simple, sturdy and long-lasting, and the other, fancy, flimsy and short-lived — offer me a framework for understanding the shift in thinking, priorities and expectations.
Straight off the bat, they are an unmistakeable metaphor for changing expectations of consumers. In increasing cases, the add-ons define the product. It’s the fancy features that reel in the customers. In the past, the focus was on manufacturing a product that was simple but durable. In the process, most products were over-engineered.
Now, the focus has largely shifted to creating a product that is easily marketable and saleable. It does not matter if it comes with a shorter shelf life. For, the consumer would not realise this, as his hunger for novelty would anyway get him to explore the other options in the market even before the shelf life of product one ends.
The two horses also reflect how the idea of permanence has changed. When I went to school, it was justifiably assumed that a batch of students would continue together, throughout their schooling.
And rarely, when someone left for another school, it was invariably a school in the same city. Now, my eight-year-old son will start his next academic year with a significantly different composition of classmates. Some of them have left for other countries, as their parents have had to re-locate due to demands of work. The horses explain the new challenges at the workplace. Recently, someone spoke to me about online re-skilling courses that are being offered for techies. As technology upgrades are constant, techies, especially those in the IT industry, have to learn new skills to stay in the reckoning. Past efficiency in a particular area does not guarantee continued success, unless they saddle up on a new horse. For them, the idea of riding the same tech horse, no matter how sturdy, for decades is inexplicably ludicrous.
