This Thursday, at the National Portrait Gallery in central London, an artwork by British artist, Es Devlin, debuted. Titled ‘A National Portrait’, the piece is built on collaboration from the UK public, and asks anyone who would like to participate to take a photo of their face and submit it. These photos are then added to the artwork in partnership with Google Arts & Culture Labs, over the course of its showing, building an evolving digital piece. Although not the first of its kind generally, it is a first for Es, who is known for her participatory work, having created pieces such as ‘Congregation’ where she made chalk and charcoal portraits of over 50 Londoners who brought their gifts to the city having experienced displacement, and working with PoemPortraits and UK Pavilion over the course of her career.
This artwork is about people – just like the consumer-facing sectors. And, although much of the customer journey is about thinking in ‘I’, there are also many moments where that ‘I’ becomes ‘we’.
In retail and consumer goods, this has often taken the form of personalisation. At its most basic, it gives the customer a sense of ownership over something that still belongs to a much bigger system. A pair of Nike trainers can be customised, a bottle of Coca-Cola can carry a name, a beauty routine can be built around a customer’s skin type, preferences and habits. These are all individual acts, but they work because they make the consumer feel seen by a brand operating at scale. The product is still mass-made, but the experience of encountering it becomes more personal.
What is interesting is what happens next. The personalised object often becomes social. Share a Coke was not only about seeing your own name on a bottle, but about finding other people’s names, giving bottles to friends, photographing them, and taking part in a moment that lots of other people recognised at the same time. Spotify Wrapped does something similar with data. It turns a private year of listening into a public ritual, where each person’s habits are different, but the format is shared. The ‘I’ is the hook, but the wider appeal comes from the fact that everyone else is doing it too.
That is where the comparison with A National Portrait becomes more interesting. Each participant begins alone, with a photograph of their own face, taken through a screen. But the final experience is collective. The individual image is absorbed into a wider portrait, constantly redrawn as more people take part. It is personal, because the contribution is your own face, but it is also communal, because that face only makes sense as part of a larger whole.
Although much of the customer journey is about thinking in ‘I’, there are also many moments where that ‘I’ becomes ‘we’.
Some consumer businesses have gone further, inviting people to shape what gets made in the first place. LEGO Ideas is one of the clearest examples: fans can submit their own designs, gather support from other fans, and potentially see those ideas become official LEGO sets. The customer is now going a step further than simply choosing between products that already exist, as they are helping to define what that product will be. In beauty, Glossier’s early success was often linked to the way it treated its community as a source of insight and language, with products shaped around the conversations consumers were already having about what they wanted, what they could not find, and how they spoke about their routines.
What this does is to change the relationship between brand and consumer, even though the business still holds the structure, the standards and the final decision. Nike still defines the parameters of Nike By You, LEGO still decides which fan ideas become official sets, and Spotify still designs the Wrapped format. But the customer is given a small peak behind the curtain as they are invited to contribute something to the taste, data, imagination, advocacy or identity.
There are physical versions of this too. Build-A-Bear has made an entire retail experience out of the customer helping to create the product, from choosing the bear to stuffing it, naming it and taking it home. The emotional value comes partly from the object, but also from the process around it making the bear mean more because the customer has taken part in making it. It is a reminder that collaboration does not have to be technologically sophisticated to feel powerful. Sometimes the important thing is simply the sense that a product or experience has passed through your hands.
That dynamic runs through many of the strongest consumer experiences. The business creates the conditions, but the meaning is made by the people who enter them. A restaurant is shaped by the room as much as the menu. A hotel is remembered through the rituals of the stay. A fashion brand comes alive in how people wear it. A sports event is transformed by the crowd. A product becomes part of culture when people use it, share it, adapt it and attach their own meaning to it.
A National Portrait makes that unusually literal. The participant’s face becomes the material. But the broader idea is one that sits across the consumer-facing world: people want to recognise themselves in the things they engage with, and increasingly, they are being invited to leave a mark. Portraiture has always been about who is seen, who is remembered and who is given space on the wall. Consumer sectors constantly deal in the same questions, in more commercial and everyday forms: who feels included, who feels recognised, who feels that something has been made with them in mind.
All of it feels somewhat comforting, and this snapshot captures something that is becoming recognised outside of art: the most memorable experiences are often the ones where people feel they’ve had a say.
