The Ordinary · Uncommon Creative Studio · May 2026
The Ordinary opened The Markup Marché — a faux supermarket installed first in Toronto, then across London, Paris, Melbourne, São Paulo and Mexico City throughout May 2026. Created with Uncommon Creative Studio, the activation dressed ordinary groceries — bananas, coconuts, avocados — in the codes of premium skincare: overwrought wellness language, elaborate benefit claims, triple-digit price tags. A banana became an "energy-boosting bar." A coconut became a luxury hydration product. These aren't arbitrary groceries. They're the raw ingredients that beauty products are actually made from, priced as if the transformation has already happened. Visitors could invent exaggerated product names at an in-store labelling station; a juice bar served drinks packaged with beauty-category ingredient hype. OOH ran alongside. The activation extended The Ordinary's long-running positioning around ingredient transparency and stripped-back branding, applying it to a new, more absurd arena.
The Tactics Behind The Work
Uncommon may not have briefed these ideas in these terms. But the tactics below are repeatable patterns — each one used across hundreds of campaigns — that describe the same strategic logic this work is built on.
1. Parody as Dumb Logic
The luxury skincare category runs on a single trick: elevated language transforms an ingredient into something more valuable than it was. The Markup Marché doesn't argue with that. It obeys the logic and applied to a coconut, a banana, an avocado. The labelling station reproduces the exact visual grammar of premium skincare and the whole charade is elegantly and absurdly exposed.. The juice bar uses the ingredient hype verbatim. Nothing winks. That's where the power is: the category's own conventions, followed without irony, until they look ridiculous.
Twice the Price Store — Sprint, Droga5, 2018, opened a store next to a Verizon outlet charging double for identical plans, making pricing reality undeniable through a single stupid retail idea. AfterLife Pay — Hell Pizza, Yarn, 2023, pushed buy-now-pay-later to its logical conclusion by letting customers legally add pizza debt to their wills. Got Wood Milk — MilkPEP, Gale, 2023, invented an artisanal milk with zero nutritional value to make dairy look like the sane choice by comparison. In each case, the dumb move is the argument — not the setup for one.
2. Salient Anchoring — Contrast and Absurd Comparison
The activation is one extended contrast anchor: take the raw ingredients beauty products are actually made from and price them as if the transformation has already happened. People are bad at judging value in the abstract; they're very good at it when you put a £305 avocado next to an ordinary one.
3. Experiential Brand Proof
The Ordinary has positioned itself on transparency for years. The Markup Marché takes that positioning off the packaging and into a space people walk through, photograph, and share. The labelling station — where visitors invent their own overblown product names — makes the audience complicit in the joke and converts participation into reach.
How Could You Have Got Here?
These are the questions that open the door to this territory. Apply them to your own brief before you reach for the obvious idea.
— What are the actual raw ingredients our product is made from — and what happens if we put a price on them before we've done anything to them?
— What's the dumbest version of our category's logic, and who could demonstrate it with a straight face?
— What logic does our category obey without question — and what happens if we follow it somewhere it has absolutely no right to go?
— What does our audience already half-believe about this category — and what would it take to make that suspicion impossible to ignore?
— Could we make our positioning physical — a space people walk through — rather than a claim people read past?
Want Your AI to Think Like This?
Questions like these are part of our prompt packs, which interrogate a brief from every angle, and are included in a paid membership on this platform. Upload them to Claude — or whichever AI you use — and start generating genuinely interesting creative territories on your next brief in minutes.
