We are what we buy

Do the brands we buy and the things we own define who we are? Like it or not, two new books say they do.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Marketing, Laura Miller, Reviews, Book reviews

June 3, 2008 | For a couple of years, I was regularly provoked by a magazine ad for a closet-design company that promised to organize "all the stuff that is your life." "There's more to my life than stuff," I muttered indignantly every time I saw it. I was a classic example of the kind of American who boasts to Rob Walker, author of the canny new book, "Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are," that she's impervious to advertising; I, too, would have proclaimed, "I'm not much of a consumer" -- a statement that Walker, who writes a column called "Consumed" for the New York Times Magazine, hears a lot. I chuckled smugly when Sarah Jessica Parker's character on "Sex in the City" realized that with the money she'd spent on a closet full of overpriced shoes she could have made a down payment on an apartment -- I had 10 modest pairs and a co-op studio. And as for my susceptibility to the sleek, white, expensive gizmos produced by a certain company in Cupertino, well, I told myself that was really all about quality. Right.

Walker, too, once considered himself above the blandishments of Madison Avenue, along with the other 77 percent of Americans who believe themselves to be exceptionally perceptive when it comes to marketing pitches. Then Nike bought Converse, the company that makes those high-top sneakers beloved by "outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Cobain." Walker, who'd been wearing Converse's Chuck Taylor All Stars since his teens, was astonished to find himself stricken by the news. His cherished hipster/underground brand had been swallowed by the Nike swoosh, "a symbol for suckers who take its 'Just Do It' bullying at face value." Maybe he was too smart to identify with the "all-style-and-image" Nike, but he'd nevertheless bought into the notion that some significant part of himself -- his "individuality" -- could be proclaimed by a pair of shoes.

"We can talk all we want about being brand-proof," Walker writes, "but our behavior tells a different story." Experimental subjects presented with two identical glasses of Coca-Cola, one labeled as such and the other presented as a mystery rival brand, routinely picked the one they thought was Coke as the better-tasting soda. Citing one cunningly designed study after another, Walker presents ample proof that we are only kidding ourselves if we believe we're impervious to the multibillion-dollar marketing industry. Nevertheless, we are not "obsessed" with consumption, as many critics claim. As Walker sees it, Americans prefer not to ruminate on that particular subject, even as we shop and spend our little hearts out. "To qualify as obsessed we'd have to really think about why we buy what we buy," Walker writes, instead of just telling ourselves that we, unlike the rest of the sheep, purchase things for purely rational, utilitarian reasons like price, quality and convenience.

If we thought about it, maybe we'd also realize that our relationship to brands and marketing campaigns has been undergoing a transformation. Marketers like to talk about the skepticism of the "new consumer," a smart young character fleeing the mainstream and adamantly resistant to all forms of advertising. Walker begs to differ. "The only problem with this theory was that it did not match up particularly well with the realities of the marketplace that I was writing about every week in the Times Magazine," he writes. Instead of being more hostile to what he calls "commercial persuasion," the consumers he observed seem very much involved with brands and products. If traditional advertising has become a less effective way of fostering that involvement, the commercial persuasion industry has in turn been fiendishly resourceful in coming up with alternative methods, infiltrating hitherto unexploited aspects of our lives. The result, as Walker sees it, is a culture in which there is a "secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are," a dialogue that shapes us even as we pretend to be untouched by it.

"Buying In" is an often startling tour of this new cultural terrain, taking in such iconic products as Hello Kitty, Timberland, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Bull, as well as Scion, a line of Toyotas that I, apparently, am too uncool to have known about before. Some of these brands, like Timberland and Pabst (or PBR, as the hipsters call it), were established, if small-time, entities before certain consumer subcultures adopted them. The hip-hop world took a liking to a line of boots that had been created for construction workers by a New England family company. Bike messengers in the Pacific Northwest made a Milwaukee beer the brew of choice in the indie-rock scene. In both cases, the manufacturers of those products were disconcerted by their new customers. What they understood to be the cultural meaning of their products -- footwear for working men, and cheap suds for the 45-to-65-year-old Midwestern set -- had been redefined by complete strangers.

This, Walker observes dryly, is what marketing managers mean when they talk of the need to "collaborate" with consumers. The CEO of Timberland became briefly notorious in hip-hop circles for seeming not to welcome the change in his customer base. (They've since patched things up and you can now buy pink versions of the classic work boots.) PBR was more sure-footed: The brewer carefully cultivated its image among the indie crowd by taking great care not to cultivate its image: no ads on local radio, no celebrity endorsements (despite nibbles from Kid Rock) and certainly no TV. PBR's divisional marketing manager, cribbing tactics from Naomi Klein's anti-corporate manifesto, "No Logo" (full of "many good marketing ideas," he told Walker!), worked to make PBR "always look and act the underdog." He was so successful at retaining the brand's cachet (or anti-cachet) that one 28-year-old Oregonian whom Walker interviewed had a foot-square Pabst logo tattooed onto his back. "Pabst is part of my subculture," the kid told the writer, pointing to the absence of Pabst advertising as evidence that "they're not insulting you."

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