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

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

• 
  Gk

  Much more than a simple, cocktail party business book -- it's an attentive, subtle and entertaining meditation that not only uncovers the latest trends in buying, selling and marketing but also pushes readers to consider larger questions beyond these subjects. Personally, since finishing the book, I've taken a harder look at my purchases and what they mean to my larger sense of identity. Not that this is some kind of Chicken Soup for the Marketing Soul, but Walker isn't afraid to follow his many case studies and pieces of hard evidence to wherever they lead, and sometimes that means not only a critique of consumer culture but a look at contemporary American culture as a whole.
• 
  Cinnamon

  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a small biz owner I am often looking for ideas on how to advertise or spread the word about what I do without being unauthentic to who I am and what I do and what my overarching biz and cultural goals are. This book didn't provide me with ideas on how to advertise better, but it did offer insight into how advertising works, doesn't work, and sometimes isn't needed. Sometimes, having the best product is all that matters in the end. He does have a chapter on the indie-biz DIY movement and mentions an event I attended and has some insight that matched my own opinion. Since this book was written several years ago, the info is a bit outdated and I would love a revision/update that examines the history that has happened since then. But I would recommend this to any person who either loves advertising, or to any person who says that advertising doesn't affect them. It does, you just have to be aware of when it does.
• 
  Marci

  I got this in a socialist bookstore which, with its focus, made me think that it would be a kind of 2008 update of Naomi Klein’s “No Logo”. Instead, it reads like a primer for brand marketers, and, in fact, its back cover is full of praises sung by business journalists. Its author, Rob Walker, is a columnist in the business press.
  
  Walker’s oft-stated thesis – that, despite marketers’ claims to the contrary, marketing is alive and kicking, just taking some different forms – would work better for a column than a whole book, and isn’t even very original. The rest of the book is written as a report on the newest techniques of the marketing industry. However, the whole shebang – whether intended or not - works as an expose of progressive marketing techniques, including ones of questionable morality. I wondered if this is why the buyer at the socialist bookstore went with this title.
  
  To his credit - and probably of notice to our socialist book buyer - Walker doesn’t shy away from the unseemly details of his story. He is a little squeamish about some of this stuff, and on top of that actually seems dismayed that Gen Y has not only embraced the brands put out by savvy marketers, but adopted these same tactics to successfully market brands they’ve personally developed. I was amused by Walker’s profile of a young marketer who found “No Logo,” Naomi Klein’s anti-brand book, to be the best book on marketing he’d ever read.
  
  
• 
  Rossdavidh

  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 years.
  
  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.
• 
  YHC

  This book doesn't seem to be thick, but contains so important message about how the marketing evolved. He gave many examples from Red Bull, Timberland, Ipod, Living Strong, the Hip-Hop generation...etc to explain the whole development between producers and consumers.
  
  We are in the murketing era ( def. from wikipedia: murketing is an advertising strategy that avoids direct sales of a product and focuses instead on vagaries such as marketing buzz, brand identity and publicity.). The commercial and ads need to use implicit way to attract consumer's buying desire.
  
  It mentioned a book written a century ago named: The theory of the leisure class. conspicuous consumption..I think this phenomenon is getting enlarged. People nowadays spent 3 months salary on a brand bag not for utility, but for showing off, to prove that they are capable to seemingly live in a different class.
  
  This book is worth to read it twice. I will get back to absorb more in the near future.
• 
  Kimball

  3.5 stars. This was a good book. I don't quite know what the point was but it was filled with a lot of anecdotes and examples of different businesses that made it a decent listen.
  
  Notes:
  
  The first brand logo believed to have been worn on the outside of a garment is some La Crost crocodile from a French tennis player in the 1920s.
  
  A logo acquires its meaning through the product it is attached to or those who wear the product.
  
  I never liked that stupid Ecko brand because it was associated with hip-hop.
  
  The more you find reasons that the object was found relevance to your own stories, the more you find rationale to buy it.
  
  Meaning flows from consumer to product not the other way around.
  
  Once something has been given to us we value it more.
  
  In a free market the consumer has the most powerful weapon - not buying.
  
  You surround yourself only with who you are.
• 
  Khelath

  Some of the anecdotes by now are obviously out of date (the most hip item in the book is the iPod and there’s no mention of the iPhone even) so you would have to read through all those to get at the gems of the ideas which are more timeless, ie, the idea that the objects we consume have meaning because of the meaning we confer onto them. Ignore the anecdotes and keep thinking about the ideas as you are reading them, and how they apply in our current landscape. Then the book becomes more relevant.
• 
  Seemy

  I enjoy reading marketing books, and this was in a way like them - case studies of various marketing strategies utilised by different businesses throughout the years and discussing how and why they worked - a sort of “evolutionary” investigation into how marketing works and changed over the years into how we convince customers to buy and create fans for our product / service.
  
  To Our Continued Success!
  Seemy
  
  http://www.WaseemMirza.net
• 
  Helen

  This might be close to 10 years old but there's still plenty of relevance here. The rise of influencers, murketing and priming continue to have an insidious presence, coupled with marketers' astute understanding of the psychological thrill of acquisition and our delusions of "control" and "uniqueness".
• 
  Izzati Rahman

  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It’s easy to understand and it gives great understanding on the history of items that were once non existent and are now household items.
  
  Gave me new perspective on marketing and makes me look at my own spending habits.
  
  Easy to read, and would definitely recommend.
• 
  Vlad

  Published 2008, so already dated in some of its perspectives. Uneven — some flashes of brilliant insight, but also some takes that feel shallow and unthoughtful. Quite disorganized, typical of books by journalists that are quilted together from reporting and essays spread across many years. Glad I read it, but I’m a marketer and feel obligated to. Not recommended for most readers.
• 
  Kirsten Achtelstetter

  Felt more like a history of marketing than anything that would give you tangible insight into how to structure your marketing efforts for your business. Also feels rather dated by many examples being pre-2000.
• 
  Francielli Camargo

  Interesting book. I did read a version from the 2000's though, so many things are outdated.
• 
  Summer

  I dig this stuff.
• 
  Andrew (M)

  “Buying In” is about the role consumers play in modern advertising (or as Walker calls it, the “commercial persuasion” industry). Whereas in the past consumers were presented with a marketing message by the advertising company, consumers now have a much greater ability to shape that message. Through numerous examples of business that employ this “murketing” strategy (a neologism that conveys the murky quality of modern marketing), we see how companies can no longer expect to force a particular message about their product onto customers. In other words, the top-down approach to selling a product is disappearing, being replaced by something much more complex.
  
  I won't go into a synopsis of all the various ideas and anecdotes in “Buying In”. It's an easy and enjoyable read, and even if you consider yourself a fairly savvy consumer you could probably learn a lot from it. One of the interesting insights has to do with the reasons we buy what we buy; while most of us claim to buy a particular product for a rational reason, the reality is that most of us buy something and then rationalize why we did so. This discrepancy between our presumed “rational” behaviour and our actual “rationale” behaviour is an interesting phenomenon. As I read it, I found myself wanting to believe that I was not one of the rationale buyers that Walker was talking about. I like to think that I buy things for a good reason and give appropriate amount of thought to my purchases. But of course that's not true of me and it's not true of you. Denying that we are affected by advertising is likely to make us more susceptible to marketing messages. This sort of consciousness raising is what makes a book like this useful.
  
  It has not escaped my notice that this review, and Goodreads as a whole, is exactly the sort of marketing that Walker describes in his book. I get no direct benefit from writing this review, except the chance to possibly influence others, while the author and the publisher stand to benefit financially if someone reads my review and goes out to buy the book. And yet I'm happy to do it. I enjoy encouraging people to read books that I find interesting (as I suspect do most people on Goodreads), and I enjoy telling people to avoid lousy books. Some people might bristle at the idea of becoming an unpaid shill for a corporation, but I think they have it wrong. By definition, we communicate in order to influence other people's behaviour. Influencing others about what they buy, use, listen to, read, etc is normal human behaviour. Companies are completely within their rights to tap into this preexisting drive (so long as there is some kind of system in place to ensure that companies do not take advantage of people and are not promoting their products deceptively).
  
  My only real beef with this book is that, while describing consumer behaviour as being post-hoc “rationale” decision-making, the author does the exact same thing throughout the book when describing various brands that have become popular due to murketing. He offers no predictions or suggestions for how other companies could do the same. Just after-the-fact rationalizations and explanations for why certain brands have become successful (whatever that means). The whole notion of murketing could be bunk, for all we know, because the book presents no prospective research into the effectiveness of this approach. While this books has many of the trappings of pop consumer psychology, it would best be described as pop consumer history. The various stories and theories in this book are interesting but they simply don't help us to make predictions about the future.
  
  Oh, and “Buying In” was scooped by theonion.com 5 years ago:
  http://www.theonion.com/content/node/...
  
• 
  Todd Stockslager

  Does what we buy define who we are? I won't tell you the punch line, you'll have to read to the last line of Walker's book to find the answer.
  
  This is a popular study of marketing and consumers--why we buy, and how marketing affects what and how we choose to buy. Walker considers and rejects the two extremes often supposed to be true today:
  
  --consumers (especially younger ones) are cynical and way too smart to buy the marketing hype.
  
  --marketing is so smart and pervasive that nothing we buy is "authentic" (whatever that means; Walker spends some interesting time thinking about this) or meets an authentic need.
  
  Consumers are smart today, no question, says Walker, and they understand marketing and hype--and buy anyway, sometimes even turning branding into an act of individualism or rebellion. In fact, Walker gives the example of Timberland boots, originally designed by manual laborers who needed tough waterproof boots, but were adopted by hip-hop artists and fans who drove sales to record levels and essentially co-opted the brand.
  
  And marketing has gotten smarter too in the age of "clicks" (the mouse, the remote control, the DVR fast forward that bypasses marketing that doesn't hit home immediately). Walker references icons such as Apple and the iPod, stressing that the iPod was not first, cheapest, or necessarily technically superior to other MP3 players when introduced, although he misses a key point in the technical and marketing success of the iPod--iTunes, which both explains the iPods success, and adds another layer of mystery to Apple's business model for the iPod. An iPod, and any MP3 player, is really just a portable storage drive (either a rotating hard drive or a flash memory drive); people buy iPods (we own four of them in our family of five!) because of the utility value of the iTunes software, which is available for free download and is in fact of such utility that I (like many other iTunes users) had downloaded it and started using it to rip and listen to my music before I got my first iPod. I've always been fascinated by a business model that bases sales of an expensive product on a component of even higher utility--that is given away! It would be interesting to hear Walker's take on this.
  
  Walker coined the term "Murketing" (murky + marketing) for the successful use of stealth marketing concepts that promote brands and brand loyalty without rising to the level of hard-core selling. In fact, murketing is successful only up to a level that is still under the consumer's radar--a level Walker calls the "murkiest common denominator."
  
  But this book is not as dry or textbook as my review may be making it sound. Walker's interviews, writing style and examples are fascinating (we all are consumers and most of us enjoy doing it, after all) and his conclusion (you'll have to read to the end of the book) is interesting. I will say that along the way he considers consumer responses such as ethical consumerism (whatever THAT means, and again he has some ideas) and handcrafted production, and even references Rick Warren's immensely popular book The Purpose Driven Life and his Saddleback Church as positive examples of why and how we relate to each other and our beliefs (or the products we buy). And its not about materialistic Christianity, quite the opposite.
• 
  Todd N

  I work for an advertising/media company (albeit one that thinks of itself as a technology company), so I was very interested to read a glowing review of this book about marketing in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
  
  This book is an attempt to sum up the latest trends in marketing and to shine some light on the American consumer's twisted and complex relationship with the concept of "brand."
  
  The most shocking thing I learned in this book (which seems sort of obvious to me know) is that every generation is lamented as being too advertising savvy and therefore too hard to market to. I remember reading these articles back in 1989 about how my generation (Generation X) is just too hard to market too, and being sort of proud of this in a weird way.
  
  Well, after reading a quote from Dorothy Parker mocking claims that the youth of her time are impossible to market to, I now realize that the exact opposite is true. Rob Walker, the author, then sketches an interesting connection between children of immigrants helping their parents adapt to America and the focus on marketing to youth today.
  
  Mr. Walker uses the term "murketing" to describe the latest, counterintuitive marketing techniques that companies are gradually beginning to master and turn to their advantage. Converse, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Timberland, Red Bull, and others are used as fascinating case studies to back this up.
  
  (Aside: The term "murketing" is so clunky and annoying that I wonder if Mr. Walker's colleague at the Times, Thomas Friedman, came up with it. It just sounds like him. But don't be put off by this term. "Murketing" is no "freakonomics.")
  
  A running theme in the book is the complex relationship that America has with brands. There is an interesting section that shows how Nike is able to have it both ways -- being a mainstream brand and having ultra trend-setters lining up for limited edition sneakers at the same time.
  
  In fact the discussion about the concept of "brand" is so convoluted that it becomes difficult to tell which statements are from marketing agencies, performance artists, Fortune 500 executives, early hip-hop heroes, or skate punks. Somehow what we get from the brands that surround us has become such a part of us that it takes great effort just to bring it to our conscious minds.
  
  I'm only scratching the surface of what is covered in this book. I highly recommend reading it, even though once you finish it you won't be able to trust casual conversation with acquaintances again.
• 
  Jennifer

  Through measurable social science studies, observations and interviews, and a sprinkling of pure conjecture, Rob Walker deconstructs the relationship between ourselves and our stuff in Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.
  
  I’ve maintained a keen interest in corporate marketing (which I now know to call the consumer persuasion industry) since my law school days, when I supplemented my meager student loan and part-time work income by participating in market research studies for corporations such as Procter and Gamble and the Kroger Company, as well as a variety of cosmetic brands. I was fascinated by what I learned about the consumer persuasion industry’s research into consumer psychology that drives marketing and its study of shoppers’ habits, omitting no detail starting with logos and branding to physical product placement in the stores. This interest has directed a lot of my pleasure reading, with industry insider books such as Candy Freak, and my avid viewing of documentaries dealing with consumer goods. I was too far indebted to the government for my law school education by the time I realized I was in the wrong business.
  
  Walker’s exposition of corporate subjects included a number of those to whom I possess brand loyalty, and it really made me think about at least what I thought were my reasons for “buying in.” According to Walker, people my age who buy my make and model of car -- whose target market was the younger Generation Y – do so because “crass, clumsy marketing” works on us. He reports on study after study that have often surprising outcomes, like a blind soda taste-test where the visually branded soda beat out the “competition,” which just so happened to be the same product in an unlabeled container. The power of suggestion, along with the persuasion of the memories (sometimes false) and feelings that we attach to “our brands,” are undeniable, and always interesting to have revealed.
  
  I think with this knowledge, I’m more introspective and aware of the persuasive tactics being used in what Walker coins as “murketing” (murky marketing), but the fact is, I’m a sucker for Diet Coke.
  
• 
  Melissa

  This book was a great beginning point for those who are interested in marketing. Everything stated in a book about effective marketing and whatnot should be taken with a grain of salt because it is never so simple.
  
  This book uses case studies to help prove the authors point. And these case studies lead to some very interesting conclusions about mankind.
  
  Reading this I came across a few lines that I thought would help someone get a feel for this book.
  
  "Branding is really a process of attaching an idea to a product." (8)
  
  "...the key to cracking the Desire Code lay in the object: To attract Consumer Economicus, build something that helps people solve a problem, or do a job, better than before." (36)
  
  "...salience- the mere awareness that a thing exists in the world- is such a big part of what the commercial persuasion industry aims to achieve." (58)
  
  "...these critics say we glom onto symbols and objects as a means of impressing, or even competing with, an audience. It's a never-ending game of 'status-oriented one-upmanship" in which we 'just want to stand out, or at least not look bad, compared to other people,"" (64)
  
  "Rational thinking, one speaker noted that morning, leads to conclusions, whereas emotional thinking, based not on deliberation but on following impulsive gut instincts, leads to actions." (69)
  
  "The simple act of not buying something has always been- and remains- the form of consumer power that brand managers fear the most" (80)
  
  "So to sell something like Axe, he concluded, "you have to become part of pop culture."" (133)
  
  "...lots of people like to tell others what they are reading and what restaurant they've discovered and what gizmo they just bought." (173)
  
  "The implication is that it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about, as long as you are willing to talk a lot." (179)
  
  "...brands can play a role in the stories we tell about ourselves and help us resolve the tension between individuality and belonging." (213)
  
  "You are what you surround yourself with." (253)
  
  "If you are a terminal materialist, you surround yourself with what you wish you were." (255)
  
  Good luck on deciding whether to purchase this book or not.
• 
  Tiffany

  I tend to think that I'm a pretty intelligent person, and more or less immune to marketing gimmicks and whatnot. So when I read the opening of Buying In, where Rob Walker states that polls show that 77% of people asked said they're "more aware" of marketing efforts than others, and 66% said they're "better critical thinkers than their typical peer," I decided maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am.
  
  Based on that, I then expected the book to be much more about ways that we're tricked into buying things, or thinking we need certain things, and for me to think, "Damn! I *was* fooled! I'm *not* immune!" but it wasn't so much about that. Or maybe I just really am smart enough to see that his examples of marketing/murketing (murky + marketing) really are marketing strategies. Maybe I *am* more aware of marketing efforts and smarter than my typical peer. :D
  
  But Buying In is a really interesting book. It discusses different types of marketing strategies--like sponsoring niche events, targeting niche markets like gamers and the hip-hop crowd, and word-of-mouth marketing, where people are hired simply to talk up products to their friends, acquaintances, and strangers; the idea of the product defining the consumer vs. the consumer defining the product; corporate ethics; conspicuous consumption vs. invisible branding; buying for who we are vs. buying for who we *wish* we were; etc. I found it all really interesting. Basically, how products and their marketing influence our lives.
  
  (But I do wish there were pictures. There are lots of times that Walker discusses a product or an advertisement, and I wish I could see what he's talking about, so I can get a better sense of his point.)
• 
  Ashley

  I was really expecting to like this book more - the premise was far more interesting than the book itself.
  
  My main complaints are that it felt disorganized to me - Walker would be discussing murketing in the 80's for example (murketing = murky marketing), and then switch gears to discussing brands, only to jump back to talking about murketing in the 90's. There was too much back and forth between time periods and topics, which gave the overall feeling of disconnectedness. There was also a lot more relating to the history of marketing than I was expecting.
  
  Some things I like include the many anecdotes about specific people, companies, and products - those are the memorable things for me. Walker did a nice job of exploring some aspects of why brands and logos speak to us so loudly and create the desire in us to own them. There was extensive discussion on counter- and sub-cultures, which felt a bit played out by the last third of the book.
  
  I felt like I read the whole book just waiting on Walker to offer an explanation for why some brands boom and others only bust - some small answers were given (i.e. a very plausible explanation for Hello Kitty's sucess), but was left feeling underwhelmed. Like I accompanied Walker on this long, drawn-out journey only for the last page to be turned and for him to say, "Well, we're not really sure. It just seems to be one of those intangible things that defies reason or explanation. But thanks for sticking with me through all that."
  
  I'm glad I read it, though. There was some interesting insights and anecdotes, but I was expecting more.
• 
  Elizabeth

  "Buying In" presents most of its information in examples of brands and their marketing. The examples are excellently chosen and very fascinating, from Red Bull to PBR to Timberland to Converse to Kia. However, the book is a bit dated and could use more relevant examples. For example, American Apparel is referenced, but from about 2006, and since then a lot has changed with the company's ethics, how they market themselves, and the owner's sexual proclivities.
  I'd lump the book in with other pop science books I've read. It's a great book to learn a bit more, and the info you'll retain is the kind that's useful in a lot of conversations and tangents. It also reads easily and doesn't posit any wild, academic, or jargon-y ideas. It really does fall flat with the second clause of its title, though, and that is why I read the book in the first place. "What we buy and who we are" is simply not covered. The author does mention a few anecdotes about how we like to buy new things, but they grow old faster than we expect, which sends us out to buy more new things, leavings an overlap of junk and an underlying sense of dissatisfaction, but I think this premise takes up a single paragraph toward the end of the book. There's no real mention of the psychology of why we, as humans and supposed individuals, buy the things we buy. The slant is more about how the marketing appeals to buyers, which is legit and relevant. I just think the title is misleading. It would be great if the author came out with a new edition that was more current.
• 
  Frank

  The message of Buying In is that while modern consumers have becomes smarter and more discriminating, they are nonetheless embracing brands like never before.
  
  Despite cynicism in general toward the persuasion industry and new technologies that allow people to bypass advertising in some contexts (using TiVo, DVRs, website ad blockers), author Rob Walker contends that people are increasingly finding value by bringing their own meanings and interpretations to brands. Using varied examples including Hello Kitty, Timberland, Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR), Red Bull, and the iPod, Walker cites case after case where the consumer brings her own meaning to the brand, often ascribing an interpretation totally unanticipated by the company owning and marketing the brand. Bottom up interest in pink Timberlands is just one of many examples from the text.
  
  This phenomenon has led to what Walker calls "murketing", partially a range of tactics that blur the lines of the traditional sales pitch, but also a whole new, closely-connected relationship between consumer and brand. Murketing includes brands quietly sponsoring extreme sports and music, tapping popular youth as commercial persuaders, and facilitating buzz agents to push products in everyday conversation.
  
  I've only touched on what you'll find in Buying In, but if you have any interest in what we buy and why, like me, you will probably find this fascinating.
  
  You can also learn more about the author and find links to his popular "Consumed" column at
  http://www.robwalker.net/contents/con....