Buying In, by Rob Walker
Subtitle: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
So, there are people who make it their task to analyze the relationship between consumer and producer. They are normally in the pay of the latter, who really ought to be called "seller" because they may not actually have produced anything (e.g. Apple pays somebody else to make their electronic devices). Rob Walker, unusually, is one of these people, but not primarily as a creator of ad campaigns, but rather as someone who analyzes them from a third party perspective. In a way, he is an ad campaign critic, perhaps even a scholar of ad campaigns in the way that others are scholars of Chaucer or 20th century French existentialists.
Walker has heard a lot of talk to the effect that the internet, and the wealth of information it has made available, as well as the fact that it enables the Long Tail of catering to smaller and smaller niches, has shifted power from seller to consumer. He is, shall we say, skeptical. This book, is more or less a rebuttal to the optimistic "consumer is king" point of view.
I have a hard time getting interested in most of this stuff, myself, not because I don't think it matters (how we consume has an inordinate impact on our politics, family life, religion, ecology, happiness generally), as because I don't think much useful writing happens on this topic. So, while I was naturally predisposed to like Walker's skepticism, I was perhaps equally predisposed to be skeptical of any theory he had to put in its place. Having finished his book (which was published in 2008), and having pondered it for a bit, I believe he may have actually said something both true, and not often said.
The first thing any analysis of advertising and marketing has to acknowledge, is that the business is not entirely unchanged by the suite of technologies generally refered to as "the Internet". It turns out that newspapers were actually methods of delivering classified ads, and are going extinct at a rapid clip largely due to Craigslist. It turns out that magazines were selling ads to people who were, by and large, not getting much exposure for their money, and once Google (and its competitors) could give them pay-per-click ads, where they could know how well their ads worked, most magazines started going the way of the dodo. These are not small changes.
Walker claims to be the creator of the term "murketing", which he first used in regards to a Red Bull stunt wherein they paid young men to ride wind-powered kiteboards from Florida to Cuba. Walker noticed that there weren't many observers, and he was the only journalist, and thought this has to be the dumbest publicity stunt ever. A couple years later, having seen many similarly murky publicity manuevers by Red Bull correspond with a rocketing market share, he began to wonder what was going on, and whether or not murketing might be a valid strategy.
The first thing he convinces us of, is that any idea that we have become "immune" to advertising or brand awareness, is stuff and nonsense. There's a lot of data here, from a lot of different sources, to prove that we are at least as aware of brands as we were fifty years ago, and at least as influenced by advertising. I could recount this, but Walker has done a pretty good job of that, and anyway it wasn't something I really had any doubt of.
Second, he analyzes the equally murky psychology of what the "consumed" object means to us. I put "consumed" in quotes, because there are cases where people buy sneakers they never take out of the box, or buy high end kitchen stoves that they never turn on. Obviously, the buyer is not immune to brands or advertising, but equally obviously, they aren't buying it to be seen if they aren't wearing the shoes, or it sits in a kitchen no one but they ever see.
They also don't seem to be just buying whatever the ads tell them to buy, though. Pabst Blue Ribbon, to take one of many examples that Walker covers, came rocketing back from the edge of extinction. Close analysis of their resurrection disproves many theories for their resurgence. It was too long after "Blue Velvet"; it predated any significant ad spending by its owners, who had a history of buying dying beer brands and milking them for their remaining sales and then killing them; it was cheap, but by no means the only very cheap beer.
Walker's theory is essentially this: consumers think about brands, a lot, but they want to decide on their own images for them rather than get one assigned by advertisers. This doesn't mean they are actually thinking about the object's real value, or that they have liberated themselves from advertising, but rather that the most effective advertising is that which lets the consumer fill in the blanks themselves. If hipsters decide that PBR is their beer, or artists decide that Apple is their computer, or hip-hop urbanites decide that Timberland is their boot, it doesn't much matter that the original targets of these brands were blue collar workers or nerds. If the seller is wise or lucky enough not to try to contradict the consumer as to what their image is supposed to be, they can end up with large brand loyalty from a group of buyers they (at least initially) knew nothing about.
In this model, more advertising can actually turn off your customers, by sending too clear a message about what it means to buy the product. This doesn't mean advertising is no longer relevant, but rather that the advertising is just supposed to bring up the name again, without providing any information, even false information, about what the product is or what you should think about it. Don't keep telling hipsters that PBR is a blue collar workingman's beer, because if you succeed, the only people currently buying your beer will stop. In this model, Hello Kitty is the perfect brand, because it is a brand that gives the vague appearance of being a character, but compared to Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson or Calvin and Hobbes, there is no character there, no back story that might conflict with what the buyer wants to project on that brand. The most distinctive thing about Hello Kitty is actually something it doesn't have (a mouth), which makes it even more of a blank canvas that the buyer can project onto. Whether they are a Japanophile nerd or a little girl who likes cute, Hello Kitty is willing to accept that image, and never contradict you.
If true, this would seem to be the final endpoint of a long evolution of advertising towards more image and less substance, to the point that even the image is almost entirely vapid and empty. The advertisers aren't even lying to you any more; you will lie to yourself, as long as they don't interrupt you with their own idea of what the product is. We don't like being told what to think, but it's not because we really want to know the truth, but rather because we want to tell ourselves our own lies about who we are and what purchases will make us that way.
I'm not totally sure if I believe it or not, but I am certain I will be thinking it over again and again in the next few weeks.
In his final chapter, perhaps more out of exhaustion at how negative his thesis is, Walker tells us one story that seems to hint at a movement of consumers towards independence. It is the modern craft movement, not yet at that point called Maker, but including people like the Austin Craft Mafia. It is the only suggestion that a few people are looking for a way to acquire items, and invest them with whatever meaning they wish, without buying permission to do so from the Corporate Behemoth first. He's clearly not sure if he can bring himself to believe it will work, and five years later it's still an open question, but it's useful if only to point out how the rest of the changes in consumer behavior are NOT any challenge to corporate dominance. If you're still giving nearly every penny you earn to corporations, and the things you surround yourself with nearly all your life all came from low-wage mass production factories overseas, it doesn't really matter what meaning you have projected onto them, they still (in a very real sense) own your life.
So, there are people who make it their task to analyze the relationship between consumer and producer. They are normally in the pay of the latter, who really ought to be called "seller" because they may not actually have produced anything (e.g. Apple pays somebody else to make their electronic devices). Rob Walker, unusually, is one of these people, but not primarily as a creator of ad campaigns, but rather as someone who analyzes them from a third party perspective. In a way, he is an ad campaign critic, perhaps even a scholar of ad campaigns in the way that others are scholars of Chaucer or 20th century French existentialists.
Walker has heard a lot of talk to the effect that the internet, and the wealth of information it has made available, as well as the fact that it enables the Long Tail of catering to smaller and smaller niches, has shifted power from seller to consumer. He is, shall we say, skeptical. This book, is more or less a rebuttal to the optimistic "consumer is king" point of view.
I have a hard time getting interested in most of this stuff, myself, not because I don't think it matters (how we consume has an inordinate impact on our politics, family life, religion, ecology, happiness generally), as because I don't think much useful writing happens on this topic. So, while I was naturally predisposed to like Walker's skepticism, I was perhaps equally predisposed to be skeptical of any theory he had to put in its place. Having finished his book (which was published in 2008), and having pondered it for a bit, I believe he may have actually said something both true, and not often said.
The first thing any analysis of advertising and marketing has to acknowledge, is that the business is not entirely unchanged by the suite of technologies generally refered to as "the Internet". It turns out that newspapers were actually methods of delivering classified ads, and are going extinct at a rapid clip largely due to Craigslist. It turns out that magazines were selling ads to people who were, by and large, not getting much exposure for their money, and once Google (and its competitors) could give them pay-per-click ads, where they could know how well their ads worked, most magazines started going the way of the dodo. These are not small changes.
Walker claims to be the creator of the term "murketing", which he first used in regards to a Red Bull stunt wherein they paid young men to ride wind-powered kiteboards from Florida to Cuba. Walker noticed that there weren't many observers, and he was the only journalist, and thought this has to be the dumbest publicity stunt ever. A couple years later, having seen many similarly murky publicity manuevers by Red Bull correspond with a rocketing market share, he began to wonder what was going on, and whether or not murketing might be a valid strategy.
The first thing he convinces us of, is that any idea that we have become "immune" to advertising or brand awareness, is stuff and nonsense. There's a lot of data here, from a lot of different sources, to prove that we are at least as aware of brands as we were fifty years ago, and at least as influenced by advertising. I could recount this, but Walker has done a pretty good job of that, and anyway it wasn't something I really had any doubt of.
Second, he analyzes the equally murky psychology of what the "consumed" object means to us. I put "consumed" in quotes, because there are cases where people buy sneakers they never take out of the box, or buy high end kitchen stoves that they never turn on. Obviously, the buyer is not immune to brands or advertising, but equally obviously, they aren't buying it to be seen if they aren't wearing the shoes, or it sits in a kitchen no one but they ever see.
They also don't seem to be just buying whatever the ads tell them to buy, though. Pabst Blue Ribbon, to take one of many examples that Walker covers, came rocketing back from the edge of extinction. Close analysis of their resurrection disproves many theories for their resurgence. It was too long after "Blue Velvet"; it predated any significant ad spending by its owners, who had a history of buying dying beer brands and milking them for their remaining sales and then killing them; it was cheap, but by no means the only very cheap beer.
Walker's theory is essentially this: consumers think about brands, a lot, but they want to decide on their own images for them rather than get one assigned by advertisers. This doesn't mean they are actually thinking about the object's real value, or that they have liberated themselves from advertising, but rather that the most effective advertising is that which lets the consumer fill in the blanks themselves. If hipsters decide that PBR is their beer, or artists decide that Apple is their computer, or hip-hop urbanites decide that Timberland is their boot, it doesn't much matter that the original targets of these brands were blue collar workers or nerds. If the seller is wise or lucky enough not to try to contradict the consumer as to what their image is supposed to be, they can end up with large brand loyalty from a group of buyers they (at least initially) knew nothing about.
In this model, more advertising can actually turn off your customers, by sending too clear a message about what it means to buy the product. This doesn't mean advertising is no longer relevant, but rather that the advertising is just supposed to bring up the name again, without providing any information, even false information, about what the product is or what you should think about it. Don't keep telling hipsters that PBR is a blue collar workingman's beer, because if you succeed, the only people currently buying your beer will stop. In this model, Hello Kitty is the perfect brand, because it is a brand that gives the vague appearance of being a character, but compared to Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson or Calvin and Hobbes, there is no character there, no back story that might conflict with what the buyer wants to project on that brand. The most distinctive thing about Hello Kitty is actually something it doesn't have (a mouth), which makes it even more of a blank canvas that the buyer can project onto. Whether they are a Japanophile nerd or a little girl who likes cute, Hello Kitty is willing to accept that image, and never contradict you.
If true, this would seem to be the final endpoint of a long evolution of advertising towards more image and less substance, to the point that even the image is almost entirely vapid and empty. The advertisers aren't even lying to you any more; you will lie to yourself, as long as they don't interrupt you with their own idea of what the product is. We don't like being told what to think, but it's not because we really want to know the truth, but rather because we want to tell ourselves our own lies about who we are and what purchases will make us that way.
I'm not totally sure if I believe it or not, but I am certain I will be thinking it over again and again in the next few weeks.
In his final chapter, perhaps more out of exhaustion at how negative his thesis is, Walker tells us one story that seems to hint at a movement of consumers towards independence. It is the modern craft movement, not yet at that point called Maker, but including people like the Austin Craft Mafia. It is the only suggestion that a few people are looking for a way to acquire items, and invest them with whatever meaning they wish, without buying permission to do so from the Corporate Behemoth first. He's clearly not sure if he can bring himself to believe it will work, and five years later it's still an open question, but it's useful if only to point out how the rest of the changes in consumer behavior are NOT any challenge to corporate dominance. If you're still giving nearly every penny you earn to corporations, and the things you surround yourself with nearly all your life all came from low-wage mass production factories overseas, it doesn't really matter what meaning you have projected onto them, they still (in a very real sense) own your life.