Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are
by Rob Walker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rob WalkerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-01-05
ISBN: 0812974093
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are
Book Review: The Mystery of Objects
Summary: 4 Stars
A book about the mysterious power of objects in our lives.
About 75 years ago, the writing was on the wall in Europe. A war was coming and the Jewish people of Europe were at great risk. Many Jewish families left while they could, leaving behind most of the things they owned and those who chose to stay.
Bruno Bettelheim's relatives were among those who stayed. They decided not to leave the possessions of a lifetime behind. They would stay, confront death even. But they would not be separated from the things they owned.
The coming storm had left them on the margins of places that their forbears had lived in for centuries. Still, their things were still theirs. Even as they faced a frightening future, Bettelheim tells us, his relatives clung with passion "to some objects in which they had invested all the meaning they could no longer find in their lives."
Later, in the camps, Bettelheim discovered that objects evoked different meanings, one meaning for the observer of the object, another meaning for the owner of the object. Hornrimmed glasses, utilitarian to him, became despicable symbols of the intelligentsia to SS guards at the camp and they persecuted their wearers with special relish.
Bettelheim who survived the campss wrote later that hornrimmed glasses had become "a fatal insignia."
Meanings, insignias and objects, these are some of the fundamental things that Rob Walker discusses in an aptly subtitled book "...What we buy and who we are." I found his analysis of the Scion's marketing campaign, using social networks, the alternative press and Generation Y identity, enlightening and would not be surprised if it became paradigmatic for marketers in the future, a fairly near future. Walker is certainly on to the new consumer behavior.
The power of things, the rock-like foundation they provide for building a life enmeshed in significance, and the sense of desolation when those things are lost, all this was evident on the other side of that European conflict. After the British bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and 50,000 deaths, a witness, Hans Erich Nossack, writes about the loss of those things.
"Nothing was left, not a single trinket of all the things that we loved and that belonged with us. If there had been such a little something, how we would have caressed it; it would have been imbued with the essence of all the other things."
Joel Agee who translated Nossack reinforces this: "Nothing. This word has a terrible resonance if one conceives it to mean what it does here: the absence of everything familiar, everything we call our own. Everything."
It is mysterious and ultimately enigmatic -- this relationship between people and their things. Walker's description of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research of this area is intriguing; perhaps this could be treated more thoroughly in a future book. Marked with craving, dependence, yearning, guilt, tainted by money and by anxiety over too much or too little in consumption, things are the central external attribute of our human lives.
No other life form shares this trait. We need things to be who we are. Without them, we are less than fully human.
Siddhartha Banerjee
Summary of Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are
Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Consumers are in control. Or so we're told. In Buying In, Rob Walker argues that this accepted wisdom misses a much more important cultural shift, including a practice he calls murketing, in which people create brands of their own and participate, in unprecedented ways, in marketing campaigns for their favorites. Yes, rather than becoming immune to them, we are rapidly embracing brands. Profiling Timberland, American Apparel, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, iPod, and Livestrong, among others, Walker demonstrates the ways in which buyers adopt products not just as consumer choices but as conscious expressions of their identities. Part marketing primer, part work of cultural anthropology, Buying In reveals why now, more than ever, we are what we buy?and vice versa.Consumerism Books
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