If you’ve been skeptical of the brands-are-dead / consumer-is-king argument, Buying In will confirm your bias. The book’s central thesis: brands are ever more pervasive in your life because you use them to reflect and construct your identity and express meaning in your life. In other words, your products are who you are and who you wish you were.
I’ve written about identity marketing and aspirational differentiation, albeit scratching the surface. Rob Walker takes the argument to the next, broader, and deeper level. A cross between cultural anthropology, journalism, and business, Buying In outlines how the line between commerce and culture has blurred: brands have become social constructs (or modern myths) and culture has become branded.
Brands nowadays are empty vessels you fill with meaning. You want to feel like a unique individual and you want to be a part of something bigger than yourself. Brands allow you to combine your desire for individual and collective identity. You use brand symbols (logos and their material objects) to construct and communicate your identity, thus becoming a part of the larger group of other people who are doing the same with those brands.
The really powerful brands manage to conceal what they are, becoming semi-blank slates on which consumers project their own meaning. They’re different things to different people – different people use these brands to narrate different personal stories about themselves. Individualized relevance means meaning flows from consumers to products – you’re just filling the blanks. Your favorite brands are your favorite not because you are who they want you to be but because they are what you want them to be.
Walker is a great storyteller: in outlining his argument he recounts stories of several brands (Hello Kitty, Red Bull, Scion, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and many more) and their paths to market penetration and mass adoption. Walker dubs the method “murketing”, i.e. murky marketing, which integrates brands into your life through methods that on surface don’t seem like marketing.
Walker injects a good amount of deep psychology in his analysis. While the psychological explanation for the pervasiveness of brands helps the argument, I found the identity explanation part more interesting. In addition, the connection between the construction of individual and group identities through brands is somewhat tenuous and prime for further elaboration.
Marketing has, indeed, changed. Advertising may not be as powerful as it used to be, but branding is stronger than ever. Companies may be losing central control over their message, but they’re willingly handing it over to the consumer, gaining ever greater access to them. And with great success, as Walker demonstrates. The trend merely reflects the post-modern shift from top-down to bottom-up discourse, and from central power – by companies, in this case – to diffuse and pervasive micro-power.
Stay tuned for follow up posts inspired by Buying In.
***
Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, New York:Â Random House, 2008.
