Book Review: Buying In
I have been looking forward to the release of Rob Walker's new book for months. Walker writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine and is one of the few journalists to write critically about popular culture and consumer trends rather than simply chronicling the ad industry as a business. And unlike your typical marketing guru, he isn't hawking consulting services, his company, or his other books.
The result is a refreshingly jargon-free analysis of the interplay between brands and consumers. Walker has an omnivorous intellect and he moves effortlessly through a range of topics including the history of advertising, world of mouth, the rise of hip-hop, and role of academic psychology in shaping marketing.
His central thesis is that all the talk about a new era of consumer control is wrong. While the orthodoxy is that consumers are tuning out advertising and demanding authenticity, it's equally true that brands have more allure for consumers than ever. And that allure doesn't just mean active consumer collaboration - reworking and remixing a brand. He gives numerous examples of consumers adopting products whole as the key expression of their identity.
With Timberland boots, for example, you had a new segment of the population- inner city African Americans- adopting a no-nonsense 50's-era shoe originally designed for rural, blue collar New Englanders. The hip-hop segment ultimately became more profitable and more influential to Timberland's future, essentially forcing this conservative company to update its style to include, for example, a florescent pink model. On the flip-side, you have brands like American Apparel or Pabst Blue Ribbon that both represent and define a lifestyle for their audience.
Walker calls this blurring of the relationship between brand and brand consumer "murketing" - which began as a joke at the expense of buzzword-loving marketers but seems to have stuck (Walker's site is www.murketing.com)
If I have any complaints about Buying In, it's that it lacks a central framework that ties the argument together. No matter what the (fascinating) anecdote, the conclusion is little more than "yep, that's murketing too". Maybe this is the downside to Walker's chops as a magazine journalist. It felt like each chapter makes a very compelling essay, but altogether it falls just short of being a seminal book. Recommended reading.
Misha Cornes
Strategists & Planners