Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are

By Emily Wilson, AlterNet. Posted September 18, 2008.

Rob Walker, author of a new book on consumer culture, explains how
consumers embrace brands as part of their identities -- often without
knowing it.

Conventional wisdom says that today's savvy consumers are immune to
marketing and unaffected by advertising. Rob Walker, the "Consumed"
columnist for the New York Times Magazine, disputes that and says
there is an important shift going on, which he calls "murketing" -- a
blurring of the lines between marketing and everyday life. Rather than
disappearing, he says, marketing is just harder to detect, and many
consumers, rather than rejecting brands, are giving their own meaning
to them and embracing them as part of their identity. In his new book,
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are,
Walker writes about the intersection of identity and consumer culture,
how marketers want us to think we're beyond advertising, and just how
Pabst Blue Ribbon got so popular. AlterNet's Emily Wilson spoke to him
by phone at his home in Savannah, Ga.

Emily Wilson: You say that a lot of people don't think of themselves
as consumers and they reject corporate culture, so they think
advertising doesn't affect them. You call that dangerous. Why?

Rob Walker: Well, I think it lulls you into a false security. Some
people associate branding with just a logo. And they say "Well, I
would never wear a logo on a T-shirt," and that's fine, but branding
is more complicated than just a logo or a slogan; it's the process of
attaching an idea to something. Often people who say they don't buy
into corporate culture are hyper-aware of the brands they're buying --
it might be Tom's of Maine or whatever -- but they often have very
specific opinions. Sometimes those choices are based on rational
thinking, but sometimes they're based on assumptions or emotions, and
it's hard to see that.

I talk in the book about my own experience with this with Nike and
Converse. I was the kind of person much like the kind of person we're
talking about. I thought, "Oh Nike, the swoosh, I would never do
that." It wasn't until Nike bought Converse that I thought, "Oh, I've
always worn Converse, what am I going to do?" There had never been a
moment that I woke up and thought, "Oh, I am an outsider
nonconformist." You don't think about those things consciously, but
then suddenly something happens and you realize it's there, and
supposedly I don't care about brands yet I'm having this big
existential dilemma about what kind of shoes I'm going to wear because
the meaning of them has changed.

EW: But you write about ethics being a factor in our consumer
decisions. Wouldn't some people say that's about ethics because they
don't want to support Nike?

RW: In some cases it is. But often it's a little bit selective. And to
stick to my own hypocrisy: I tend to wear Levi's jeans, and what
really is the difference between the production process of Levi's and
Nike, and can I really defend myself on that? Not really. I run into
that a lot.

People will kind of get their ethical hit from doing one type of
consumer behavior and one brand they're really loyal to, something
like fair trade coffee for example. And then they don't apply that in
other (cases), and they don't really stop and ask any questions at
all.

So I think this sort of attitude of "I'm above it all, and all my
decisions are right" is the mind-set marketers want you to be in. They
want to push your buttons, whether it's about ethics or whatever.

EW: You say there is a tension we have between wanting to be an
individual and wanting to belong to something. How does that play out
in the marketplace?

RW: I use the iPod as an example of something that serves different
roles for different people. For some people, that is a very
individualistic device with their personal soundtrack on it. And most
analysis nowadays really focuses on how, as a culture, we're all into
personalization and individualization and customization, and we all
want to be different, but that is sort of overlooking this equally
powerful urge, I think, which is to be part of something bigger than
ourselves. So with a product, it's getting the one everyone has
because it's the one to get. ... You can't really make a
straight-faced case any more for the iPod as individualistic. I said
in a column recently that owning an iPod is about as individual as the
gray flannel suit.

EW: It was when you wrote about the Red Bull campaign that you coined
the term "murketing." What was unique about that campaign?

RW: It was not known in the United States but was a big company
overseas, and the traditional way for something like that to roll out
through much of the 20th century has been to make a big noise. They
weren't a start-up; they were a big company with a lot of resources
coming into a new market with a new idea. So, usually, what you do is
you take out ads and sell it and say, "Here's this new idea, and
here's why you should buy it" and sort of explain yourself. As loudly
as possible. They took a totally different approach. They did a lot of
really small events, and they never really explained themselves. The
full extent of the sell is it said "with taurine" on the can, and no
one knew what taurine was, and that was sort of the mystique, as they
would put it, of this stuff. And what you hear is to approach the
influencers first, but they didn't really do that. They were
approaching all kinds of different groups of people. Extreme sports
people, club kids, college kids, people leaving gyms, people taking a
break outside their office. That's kind of the opposite of traditional
marketing, which is supposed to make clear what this is and who it's
for. But by doing this small-scale thing, everyone thought it was for
them, and I think they did it by being kind of vague and letting
consumers fill in the blanks.

EW: You say that now the consumers are giving meaning to brands. Could
you give an example of that?

RW: Well, in some ways, the Red Bull example. Another one is the Pabst
Blue Ribbon example. That was one where that brand started to make a
comeback after many decades of declining sales, and the company itself
didn't really know what was going on or why. It was the cheap beer,
and then people were embracing this idea that it was an underdog and
wasn't insulting you with advertising. It was kind of anti. Embracing
that was supposedly a statement against the mass beers. It gave it a
kind of brand meaning that the company had nothing to do with. It was
invented completely by consumers. There was never any kind of
outsiderness or rebelliousness or nonconformity associated with Pabst.
It was a poor example of a lot of what they were talking about because
they had long since liquidated the factory and laid off the workers
and subcontracted the brewing to someone else.

EW: You write that we think that, because of TiVo, we are in control
and about how being able to click makes us feel that we have choices
and that we're immune to marketing. You give examples of how people
have been saying that the consumer is in control for years and years.
So what sort of shift has technology made?

RW: Ever since there's been advertising, there have been people
complaining about advertising, seeing through advertising, and mocking
advertising. And advertisers get kind of upset about that, saying,
"These consumers are such a pain in the ass; why can't they just do
what we want them to do?" What's a little bit different in this
go-round is that I think it's been embraced by the consumers
themselves. That click gesture gives us a lot of feeling of control.
And it does give us some control. There is some truth in that.

The thing is that marketers aren't dopes, and they didn't react to
TiVo by saying, "Well, we're out of business." They reacted by saying,
"We have to, once again, come up with new tactics and new modes," and
as it happens, every single new piece of technology that comes along
offers opportunities to them as well. With the possible exception of
TiVo, I guess, but TiVo has been responded to. Just one example is the
incredible spike of branded entertainment itself, of the brands moving
into the shows.

The upshot is you see a campaign like the one that has built Axe
deodorant, where they built Web sites and Web games that people
interact with and forward to their friends. They created a fake girl
group called the Bom Chicka Wah Wah Girls, which gets millions of
views on YouTube and is just basically a long-form ad for Axe.

They dream up a concept for a television show called "Game Killers"
that comes right out of a creative brief, and it gets picked up and
becomes a show on MTV. So all of this technology presents interesting
opportunities for marketers as well because, you know, they're doing
their job and they're not fools, and in fact, they're very smart and
creative people who are well paid to come up with solutions to these
problems.

EW: How do you think this idea that we're in control plays out in
other areas like politics?

RW: People will point to things like Facebook and text messaging and
so on as grassroots -- empowering ways to spread ideas. It's hard for
me to say. I heard this guy talking who was from a climate change
group, and he was talking about how, in the '80s, the South African
divestment movement came out of campuses all over the country, and
that actually was pretty effective pressuring universities to divest
from South Africa. It was kind of a social movement, and it had a real
effect, and this guy was saying he was trying to recreate this with
the issue of climate control.

There is something equivalent to that in joining a Facebook group that
says "Save Darfur," and you put that in your Facebook profile. What do
you actually do? Is that activism? Does it have an impact? I don't
know. And if you've done it, do you feel like you've done a good deed
or that you've participated in activism?

I think people are a little glib about a lot of this stuff. And
they'll say, "Isn't it amazing that a political candidate or a social
movement can connect with all these people." And it is amazing if it
results in something changing. But it's not so amazing if it just
means people feel like they've done something and not much has
happened.

I'm not condemning Facebook, but I think the bottom line is it's still
a little early to know if it going to lead to things happening in the
world that we haven't seen happen, or is it going to lead to us
sitting around clicking and feeling good about ourselves. I don't
think it's known yet.

EW: You have a chapter in Buying In about the DIY/craft movement. What
do you think is significant about that?

RW: Well, it's a rather large subculture of younger people kind of
responding to their problems or questions or alienation from mass
production culture with more material culture. They're sort of saying,
"We'll make things ourselves," and then that leads to selling things
ourselves. I think what's interesting about it is that there is
something that ties into real behavior, wanting to know how it's made
and what it's made of, and brings in some of these environmental or
labor or ethical concerns. And I think what's interesting with the DIY
world is they're selling things on Etsy for example, and people are
drawn into Etsy for reasons that have nothing to do with those ethical
concerns, but then once they get there, it becomes something they can
maybe get engaged in.

I wouldn't call it a consumer movement. There's actually a history of
very powerful movements that have led to really important things like
food labeling and safety standards and so on. Those have tended to be
led by what I would call more traditional terms of activism that are
aimed at making change, not on an individual level, but one that
benefits the greater good. The DIY world is much more capitalist, but
it was the most hopeful movement I could see out there, where perhaps
these marketing mechanisms can lead to at least different ways of
thinking about consumer culture.

EW: In Buying In you write about the secret dialogue between marketers
and consumers. How do you hope that dialogue might change after
reading the book?

RW: Well, what I'm trying to do is pull back the curtain and say,
Here's how two things work: one, the marketing industry, and two, your
mind. I call it a secret dialogue because there's a lot going on there
that we sort of overlook. We think we understand, but we really don't.

And I believe we do, by and large, care about the impacts of our
consumer decisions on our own lives and on the planet. In survey after
survey, people will say they care about those things, but we don't
really behave that way, so I hope this will let people be more
equipped to make the decisions that are more satisfying to them.

Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City
College of San Francisco.