The flattery economy: what copying actually teaches

There's a line from the Chery QQ story that I find more interesting than the legal drama usually attached to it: Chinese designers who copied Western cars often altered the cylinder capacity or added new front and rear sections because straight imitation was considered uncritical adherence to foreign ideas. They weren't just reproducing — they were arguing with the original while using it as a scaffold. That distinction between reproduction and apprenticeship is easy to miss, and it changes what the copying means.

Aldi's caterpillar cake situation has a different texture but a similar logic underneath. The Cuthbert campaign worked because shoppers were already in on the joke. A dupe isn't a counterfeit trying to pass itself off as the real thing — it's an open quotation, priced for people who recognise the reference. The original brand does the cultural work of making something desirable; the lookalike converts that desire at a lower price point. There's a kind of honesty in that transaction that the word "copying" tends to obscure.

What connects a Chinese car factory in 2003 and a British supermarket's birthday cake aisle is the role the original plays. In both cases the copied thing functions less as intellectual property being stolen and more as a shared cultural object being responded to. The QQ's buyers were first-time car owners for whom the car was primarily a status symbol — a domestic product that recalled the glamour of a Western brand was the affordable way into that meaning. Aldi's shoppers know exactly what Cuthbert is doing on the shelf. The knowing is the point. Neither case is really about deception.

The Thatchers cider ruling complicates this a little — the Court of Appeal found in January 2025 that Aldi had taken unfair advantage of Thatchers' packaging trade mark, partly because Aldi had departed from its usual house style for that one product specifically. Which suggests there's a line somewhere between quoting a category and targeting a competitor. Where that line sits is genuinely unclear to me, and probably to the courts too. What I keep wondering is whether the dupe economy, as it matures, starts producing its own originals — things made to be quoted, designed with their imitators already in mind.