![[Buying In book cover]](/images/posts/kindle_buyingin.jpg)
I bought Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are after seeing him in Objectified, a documentary about product design. His attitude was on the verge of being cynical, but I think it was just his no-B.S. way of explaining things that I really liked.
Buying In is about consumerism. It tries to explain why people associate or disassociate themselves with certain brands and make the purchasing decisions that they make. I’m not sure if I’d want to buy any more books on this subject, but it was pretty interesting. The book goes through a lot of different examples of brands and sub-cultures and I think it depended on them a little too much. I expected more conclusions to be drawn and a lot of times he would say he would go into things later towards the end of the book, but I don’t really think he did.
It is pretty obvious that he’s obsessed about this topic, though, and knows his stuff. I especially liked how he talked about Etsy.com and American Apparel, two sort of anti-bad-consumer brands that fit into the bigger picture in interesting ways.
While highlighting this book on my Kindle, it was funny how I kept highlighting big chunks of information, compared to the book I read before, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, where a lot of meaning was packed into one or two sentences. Here are my highlights for Buying In:
Loc. 176-78, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:18 AM
But why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker—any brand of sneaker? I know why I rejected the swoosh. In Air Force 1’s, I’d feel like a brand zombie. But what I suddenly couldn’t reconcile was my belief that I could project my individuality through some other brand.
Loc. 195-97, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:21 AM
So we can talk all we want about being brandproof, but our behavior tells a different story. This is why I have come around to the view that there is nothing to be gained by simply believing we are immune to brands. But there might be something gained in understanding why we aren’t.
Loc. 262-64, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:28 AM
So when Consumer Reports, or whatever other authority is doing the testing, studies some group of products, the conclusion is invariably that most of the choices are, you know, pretty good. All that’s left is to sift among increasingly minor differences to decide which one is the very best value of all, by however absurdly narrow a margin.
Loc. 354-57, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:42 AM
Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an “echo,” which turned out to be Marc.)
Loc. 373-75, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM
The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring.
Loc. 376-77, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM
A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world, or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines.
Loc. 395-98, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:37 PM
A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical sixteen-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an “authentic” one or not.
Loc. 440-43, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:28 PM
Hello Kitty’s blank, “cryptic” simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”—and let’s be frank: meaningless—symbol comes to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashionability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth.
Loc. 532-35, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:40 PM
These days, talented young skaters send “sponsor me” videos to equipment makers, hoping to get “on flow” (meaning that they get free, branded, product). A skater named Skyler Siljeg was on flow by the age of ten, with almost twenty sponsors, including Jones Soda (which got its name onto Siljeg’s helmet when he was five years old) and Black Flys sunglasses, along with various equipment and apparel makers like Quiksilver.
Loc. 561, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:43 PM
Loc. 563, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:43 PM
book The Organization Man
Loc. 567, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:44 PM
2000 book Bowling Alone
Loc. 597-98, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:54 PM
1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige, deconstructed punks, mods, teddy boys, and others.
Loc. 609-11, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:55 PM
Consider, for example, the Red Hat Society, notable for bright costumes, exuberant group behavior, and the fact that it is made up of women age fifty and over. Here the subculture motive is to challenge the way that society expects older women to behave.
Loc. 636-38, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:58 PM
But the “Beautiful Losers” crowd and the Red Hat Society offer examples of very different ways to do something that appears quite similar—using symbols of leisure activities and material culture to help us feel as if we have resolved the tension between individuality and belonging.
Loc. 649-51, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 07:58 PM
he acknowledged that it’s more typical to cite the culture of consumption as something that undermines social togetherness, not creates it. But he countered that groups of Saab, Bronco, and Apple admirers—all studied by Muniz and O’Guinn—even possessed “a sense of moral responsibility.”
Loc. 753-56, added Sunday, April 19, 2009, 11:53 PM
Essentially, they had invented, on a nonconscious level, a rationale for their behavior that justified it despite clearly contradictory evidence—much the way a smoker who knows cigarettes are dangerous invents rationales for having another one just the same. Festinger labeled this phenomenon “cognitive dissonance.”
Loc. 845-49, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 09:13 AM
Finally, the researchers repeated the experiment, with a twist. This time, the ads and ad evaluation questions were tweaked to include Bugs Bunny, who (you might recall) is not a Disney character at all. About 16 percent of subjects subsequently claimed that, as a child, they had shaken hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney theme park. Subsequent research found that repeated fake-ad exposure led to higher false memory rates—25 percent in one study and 36 percent in another.
Loc. 920-23, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 09:24 AM
In their book Trading Up, about the “better-educated, more sophisticated,” and “more discerning” modern consumer, Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske contend that buyers of Viking Range products are expressing their “Individual Style” as well as their interest in adventurous seeking of new experiences—presumably culinary ones, in this case. Then they add this observation: “Some 75 percent of Viking cooktops installed are never used.”
Loc. 1147-50, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 07:14 PM
The more salient the iPod became, the more consumers discovered ways that it was relevant—but not because of any single specific property of the device. The key wasn’t in a single answer; it was in the variety of answers. And this is what connects it to the Livestrong bracelet. The iPod succeeded not because of any specificity, but because of multiplicity. It fit into many disparate personal narratives, by way of many disparate rationales.
Loc. 1454-55, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:24 AM
An even more compelling, and crucial, instance involves rap pioneers Eric B. and Rakim. Look at the cover of their 1987 album, Paid in Full.
Loc. 1462-65, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:13 PM
As Persaud suggested, the Gucci logo certainly had currency in Harlem street style by the early 1980s; if you look at photos from that era, you may wonder where these garments positively covered with the logos of Gucci and other luxury brands came from. They came from Dapper Dan and other customizers, who seized these symbols that were loaded with top-down meaning from the world of haute couture and essentially used them to create something new, from the bottom up.
Loc. 1466-68, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:14 PM
a 1982 glazed calfskin jacket all-over-screened with Louis Vuitton logos and a jacket featuring Nike logos that apparently predates any actual Nike clothing.
Loc. 1475-77, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:15 PM
Both the making and the buying of such garments stand as a vivid example of a bottom-up seizing of absolute control of a logo, a brand, and its meaning. Through Dapper Dan’s creations, luxury brands were given, against their will, a fresh significance to a new consumer who had never been those brands’ intended target.
Loc. 1540-45, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:25 PM
“Converse is a brand that is uniquely qualified to rely on its consumers to express themselves creatively,” Greg Stern, president of the agency, explained to me. “It’s always been worn by creative people; the brand itself is a symbol of creative expression.” Some sample ads made by Converse-wearing friends of the agency were posted to a site called ConverseGallery.com (along with one hundred cleared music tracks that potential ad makers could use), and then the agency “seeded” blogs and chat groups with an invitation to brand fans to “express yourself” by making a spot.
Loc. 1671-73, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 09:28 AM
Some cited the famous scene in Blue Velvet, when the character named Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, reacts to another character’s preference for Heineken by saying: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
Loc. 1747-50, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 10:25 PM
The single key text in Pabst marketer Neal Stewart’s codification of the meaning of PBR was, of all things, the book No Logo, by the journalist and commentator Naomi Klein. Published in 2000, No Logo presented an argument about branding and marketing overload, the bullying and rapacious mind-set that this trend represented, and evidence of a grassroots backlash against it, especially among young people.
Loc. 1863-67, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 10:37 PM
She told an anecdote about a friend from her college days, an alt-rock type, who has ended up driving a shuttle bus for a university and refused to sell ad space on it; apparently, he didn’t want students to think he was selling them out in some way. Yoshizu sounded impatient with her friend’s attitude. “Those kids don’t care,” she said. “They understand. Y accepts advertising and marketing.” They are not, she argued, hung up on the notion of “selling out.”
Loc. 2072-74, added Sunday, May 03, 2009, 11:15 AM
I’m afraid the poor old billboard doesn’t qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it, and that is not its to give away. Nor is a walk down the street brought to you through the courtesy of outdoor advertising.”
Loc. 2193-96, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 09:17 AM
Well, I asked, if a deodorant isn’t competing against deodorants, what is it competing against? “Pop culture,” Gelner replied. “You’re competing against things like movies, television shows, sporting events, other advertisers, the Internet.” So to sell something like Axe, he concluded, “you have to become part of pop culture.”
Loc. 2208, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 09:19 AM
Art Prostitute, a magazine based in Denton, Texas, with a print run of 2,500.
Loc. 2580-83, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:39 PM
Jackson Lears, in his books Fables of Abundance and Something for Nothing, has explored a history of America that is not simply a triumphant march of progress, but an ongoing competition between two visions of life: one guided by doctrines of science and technology and rationality, the other by beliefs that transcend the measurable and controllable and tilt over into the realms of fate, providence, and even magic.
Loc. 2583-85, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:39 PM
“The recurring motif in the cultural history of American advertising,” he has written, “could be characterized as the attempt to conjure up the magic of self transformation through purchase while at the same time containing the subversive implications of a successful trick.”
Loc. 2596-99, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:41 PM
A study in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience reported that the only ingredient in energy drinks found to have a measurable impact on mood and performance was caffeine (energy drinks generally have extremely high caffeine content). As for taurine, another nutrition expert, at Rutgers, has summarized: “We haven’t got a clue to what it does.”
Loc. 2642-44, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:10 AM
In 2006, it cut a deal with the Independent Film Channel to produce five-minute alt-sports documentaries about its various stunts and extreme-sports activities, never shilling directly for the drink but not exactly turning the camera away if it happened to come to rest on a Red Bull logo worn by a participant. (This fit into IFC’s efforts to create “TiVo-proof” revenue sources, Brandweek noted.)
Loc. 2703-6, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:16 AM
The sausage campaign was organized by a small company in Boston called BzzAgent, part of a wave of firms that have sprung up in recent years to serve the growing number of companies that concluded they needed to find new, postclick forums for consumer seduction. The forum they had in mind was not TV ads or billboards or even video games, but rather the conversations we have in our everyday lives.
Loc. 2713-16, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:17 AM
an agency working on behalf of Sony Ericsson once hired sixty actors in ten cities to accost strangers and ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event.
Loc. 2720, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:18 AM
Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders
Loc. 2761, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:25 AM
The Frog King was a quirky, comic first novel by a young writer named Adam Davies.
Loc. 2793-94, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:29 AM
she heard about BzzAgent through a website called Bookcrossing.com, an online community where someone had posted about the firm.
Loc. 2819, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:07 AM
1962 academic book Diffusion of Innovation, by Everett Rogers
Loc. 2837-39, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:10 AM
The results of these businesses have been mixed. Aprons for men was one legendary trend-spotting gaffe that emerged from the mining of Magic People thoughts. In the mid-1990s, Sputnik predicted such trends as “guys in vinyl skirts,” “see-through track shoes,” and “suspenders with African-print shirts.”
Loc. 2889-90, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:15 AM
He submitted a rave review for a fantasy novel he was buzzing called Across the Nightingale Floor to the Concord Monitor, and it was published;
Loc. 2911-12, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:17 AM
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.
Loc. 2930-31, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:20 AM
Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter, but also, as Balter puts it, “the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.”
Loc. 2943-46, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:22 AM
They found that when two items of equal value are handed out randomly to a group of people and those people are given the opportunity to trade, hardly anyone does. It’s very unlikely that all the participants were randomly handed the objects they would have preferred had they been asked in advance, so the economists concluded that once something has been given to us, we value it more.
Loc. 3017, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:31 AM
Loc. 3051, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:10 PM
another book he had read because of BzzAgent. Called Join Me,
Loc. 3077-79, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:13 PM
There’s an alternative, one that’s summed up neatly in a question that A-Ron had been asking himself around the time that I first met him: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”
Loc. 3140-42, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:21 PM
Perhaps the threat that brand-smart young people really pose to commercial persuaders is not that they have stopped buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too—and the next big thing will be a million small things.
Loc. 3160-61, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:23 PM
Ten years ago, a new T-shirt design could not be flashed around the planet minutes after completion. Nor could it be championed in blogs like Hypebeast and Slam X Hype, dedicated to this practice, reporting dozens of new products or design collaborations from the brand underground every day.
Loc. 3164-65, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:25 PM
I met Yu-Ming Wu. He was twenty-three and the cofounder and “sneaker editor” of a website called Freshnessmag.com.
Loc. 3176-78, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:25 PM
book about sneaker hunting in the 1970s and 1980s, Where’d You Get Those?—a blend of memoir, sociology, and the cataloglike history of urban sneaker collecting that made the case for sneakers as nothing less than symbols of personal identity.
Loc. 3178-82, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:26 PM
If there was a consumer base willing to think of athletic shoes made by multinational corporations that way, then a new breed of boutique stores, which started to appear in the early 2000s, would serve them. Eventually the sneaker companies got wise and began to cater to this market, manufacturing rarity through “limited editions,” commissioning small runs of sneakers made for specific stores or designed with the help of people like Mister Cartoon or Neckface. (If you don’t know who they are, these shoes aren’t for you.)
Loc. 3294-95, added Friday, May 08, 2009, 09:35 PM
gritty, turn-of-the-century New York underworld described in Luc Sante’s book Low Life.
Loc. 3335-36, added Friday, May 08, 2009, 09:40 PM
In his book about luxury, Living It Up, scholar James Twitchell compared the effect of certain rarefied, high-end brands with a dog whistle.
Loc. 3560-61, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:40 PM
young woman shot in a raw and vaguely decadent style reminiscent of Terry Richardson or Nan Goldin.
Loc. 3554-57, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:40 PM
While more and more mass-market companies were introducing ethical-sounding subbrands or products to appeal to a concerned niche, America Apparel was attempting to move in the opposite direction: from a “sweatshop free” image that appealed to a relatively small group of consumers to a much bigger customer base that may not know a thing about where or how the company’s products are manufactured.
Loc. 3576-78, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:42 PM
Charney had concluded that ethical consumers were—whatever the polls might say—a niche. And he wasn’t going to sell as many T-shirts as he wanted to by targeting a niche. He didn’t want a niche, he wanted a generation. And thus: youth and sex. “We make sexy T-shirts for young people,” he summarized.
Loc. 3602-5, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:45 PM
It’s not that he cares less about treating his workers ethically, Charney insisted, it’s that he doesn’t think trumpeting work conditions will help him compete. Sure, he hoped quality or social consciousness or logo escapism would each attract some consumers. But he also hoped that selling a sexed-up version of youth culture to young people would attract others, and hopefully in greater numbers.
Loc. 3646-49, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:49 PM
he had pulled out a copy of a book called The 48 Laws of Power and read me number thirteen, which suggested that to get what you want, you must appeal to the self-interest of others, not to their mercy. “That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”
Loc. 3674-75, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:53 PM
As Lizabeth Cohen, an American studies professor at Harvard, explains in her book A Consumers’ Republic, the notion of “ethical consumption” dates back at least to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressive era,
Loc. 3686-87, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:54 PM
In his book The Marketplace of Revolution, historian T. H. Breen even makes a case that collective consumer protest was crucial to nothing less than the founding of the United States itself.
Loc. 3761-63, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:04 AM
Reiterating the political and “antiauthority” aspects of the “ethic of Do It Yourself,” she mused: “In the age of hypermaterialism, Paris Hilton, and thousand-dollar ‘It’ bags, perhaps making stuff is the ultimate form of rebellion.”
Loc. 3788-90, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:07 AM
Debbie Stoller, founder of the pop-culture-meets-feminism magazine Bust (which began as a photocopied zine), championed knitting in a book called Stitch ’N Bitch, which became a minor sensation in the early 2000s.
Loc. 3816-18, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:10 AM
“Everyone agreed,” she told me, “that having your own small business at this time we are at in America is a political movement in itself. Running a small business yourself and trying to separate yourself from the masses—it’s a political statement.”
Loc. 3857-60, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:15 AM
what backlash? Type “iPod” into the online craft emporium Etsy.com’s search engine and you get nearly a thousand product listings—all manner of nifty handmade personal things in which to encase what is, rather definitively, a mass-market object, available at big-box retailers everywhere.
Loc. 3868-69, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:16 AM
The Wal-Mart Effect, which delves into the negative social consequences of the low-low prices that have lured so many shoppers for so long.
Loc. 3878-80, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:19 AM
But still: Buying a handmade iPod cozy doesn’t sound revolutionary—it sounds more like creating new desires than finding new ways to fulfill enduring needs. Kalin replied to this point by saying he has made it a personal goal to end up with a wardrobe that consists entirely of handmade clothing.
Loc. 3884-87, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:21 AM
Stores like Target were selling shirts that only looked as if they were hand-silk-screened with rough, unfinished edges, she said—but maybe this helped make genuinely handmade goods “more approachable” to a wider group of consumers. “People say, ‘I can buy something like this at Target for $10, how come you’re selling yours for $40?’ And I can tell them, ‘Well, that was made in China, and I made this one myself.
Loc. 3894-96, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:24 AM
If you’re worried about tainted dog food from a foreign factory, you won’t find an alternative on Etsy. Many crafters work with raw materials—beads, fabrics, and so on—that are actually products of the global supply chain.
Loc. 3959-61, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:31 AM
what Warren’s argument suggests is nothing less than that commercial culture is a dead end—that it can never really resolve the fundamental tension of modern life, and that whatever pleasures you may find in consumerism will not last. The ultimate irony of what he has called “America’s rampant individualism” is that it does not satisfy the self.
Loc. 4021-23, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:37 AM
But one of the themes that eventually emerged from their work, described in their 1981 book, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, is that some objects matter a great deal—not least because of their relationships to other people or larger ideas.
Loc. 4023-25, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:38 AM
In other words, the things that mattered had meaning precisely because they were symbols: The crucifix, the wedding ring, the diploma, and the trophy are some obvious examples of things that exist purely to join us to—to symbolize—something else (a belief system, a union, an achievement, a memory).
Loc. 4030-34, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:39 AM
Part of what the authors found was that—not surprisingly—the most meaningful objects were rarely chosen on the basis of some intrinsic, rational property, like marketplace value, cutting-edge quality, simple aesthetic pleasure, or anything that an economist might describe as “utility.” They were chosen instead for connections to something else: family or social ties, a particular episode in the narrative of the subject’s life, perhaps religious faith or some other belief system affiliation.
Loc. 4060-63, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:10 PM
what adaptation research suggests is not that we don’t know novelty fades, but that we’re not good at figuring out how to factor this knowledge into our decision making: “Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event, almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.”
Loc. 4111-13, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:16 PM
The Andrew Andrew fashion line had never included an actual article of clothing. “That’s the whole point,” Andrew said. But from their perspective, it’s perfectly consistent with the way consumption now works. People do not buy objects, they buy ideas about products.
Loc. 4115-17, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:16 PM
“And the thing about that is we’re in such an absurd place with clothing and food,” Andrew interrupted. “We don’t buy food for its nutritional value, nor do we buy clothing for its protective value. It’s entirely—we buy for all the wrong reasons.”