Rob Walker is The New York Times Magazine’s “Consumed” columnist and author of the new book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. In the following interview, Kevin Zimmerman, Senior Editor of “The Marketing Xfactor,” asks Walker about his arguments that no consumer is “brand-proof” and traditional marketing tactics still carry a lot of weight.
Q: How did Buying In come about? A: As I was writing “Consumed,” I thought there was something bigger going on. All the talk about how the new empowered consumer was indifferent to brands, was “brand-proof,” was so out of line with what I saw happening on a regular basis. I think you can probably make better decisions if you can get over this idea of being brand-proof, and get a little more realistic sense of what’s going on in your own head and in the marketplace.
Q: One of the key takeaways from your book is the concept of “murketing.” Can you explain what the term means? A: It’s about the murkiness we see now between what is branding, and what is everything else. What’s happening as the result of TiVo and some of these other emerging technologies is the potentially lessening of the impact of such initiatives as the 30-second commercial. However, people in the business of marketing are clever. They saw this trend coming, and unleashed quite a bit of creativity in terms of where marketing could be in our lives. That could take the form of television shows that are essentially a spin-off of a creative brief of a brand, as happened with (male grooming product) Axe and its show Game Killers– you can’t really TiVo the ads out; it’s the show.
On the flip side, word-of-mouth agencies came along and didn’t hire an actor to go out and pretend to like a product in public. It was more of a voluteer basis, where they’d say, “Hey, sign up, you average consumer, and maybe youo’ll get some free products and tell your friends about it, and then tell us aboutthat.” You would think intuitively that given what we say in polls about hating commercials, no one would do that, but in fact tens of thousands have signed up.
Q: Another example you cite in your book is the fact that Ramones t-shirts outsell Ramones albums by an exponential factor. What does that tell us about iconography, especially when it arguably comes at the expense of the icon– in this case, the music– itself? A: People are slightly resistant to the idea of logos in general, but the Ramones logo means something that’s so instantly translatable. It’s different to different people, but it serves as shorthand for “maverick spirit” and “independent music.” The same is true for the CBGB t-shirts, where the club doesn’t even exist anymore.
It’s not conspicuous consumption, where you’re trying to show off to other people; it’s more a self-signaling situation where you have a story of yourself in your head and what’s consistent with it, and what isn’t.
Q: Is there a pitfall involved when people take that approach, that “I am defined by this brand / product?” A: That’s the payoff I build to, what I want readers to think twice about. Is this a reflection of who you are, or more a hope or a building block? You can’t really build a self through the things that you own. It’s a basic point of psychology. People get tired of things. We do a poor job of evaluating how long the happiness of acquisition will last.
If you’re trying to build a self through acquisition of symbols, it becomes a never-ending loop. You can’t decide to go to the mall to see who you are; you have to know who that is first.
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