BUYING IN: THE SECRET DIALOGUE OF WHAT WE BUY AND WHO WE ARE by Rob Walker

Often, the hardest jobs in the world are ones that involve stating the obvious. Or, rather, stating what amounts to "the obvious" for 90% of the population to the 10% of the population for whom the information is worth $15,000. And then, of course, getting them to believe it. In Buying In, Rob Walker screams, smoke signals, and signs the latest version of "the obvious": Generation Y is NOT immune to marketing. The "consumer revolution" is, basically, a term futurists use to garner checks from the likes of Proctor & Gamble (after all its mentions in this book, I was wondering if Rob got an endorsement from them, a stunt that would be oddly appropriate for a book that seeks to explain underground marketing techniques). The consumer is not in charge; the inmates are still quietly resting in the asylum. In fact, as Rob implies, the inmates have more in common with the Big Nurse itself than with any sort of "selling out" Gen X quasi-rebellious anti-consumerist attitudes.

Rob starts by explaining "The Desire Code," best defined as a rough formula for why we buy the things we buy (and if you're thinking things like price, quality, etc., prepare for reeducation). The problem, Walker says, is "the Pretty Good Problem." Basically, Oscar Mayer and Miller sell the exact same product: hot dogs. By now, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration, you can be pretty darned sure there isn't rat feces (at least in industrial amounts), uncleaned fish entrails, or bull semen getting stirred into the mix a la The Jungle. They're both just meat in a bun; they are both "pretty good." So, how do you choose? Herein lies "The Desire Code," in a process that involves highly complex personal narratives we have with ourselves, including the constant struggle to reconcile our individuality with a sense of community. Symbols (often in the form of brands), he assures us, help us to create that identity: Apple=nonconformist (for most people), for example, and Apple fans will pay more for "their brand" even if a cheaper knockoff is more practical. Most of this first section is common sense to that 90% of the population. The second section, however, may come as something of a shock.

The problem, really, Rob tell us, isn't that Generation Y (AKA "the youth") see through traditional advertising; the problem is that EVERYBODY sees through traditional advertising, if they take the time to look at it for that long. In the era of "the click" and TiVo, you truly are in control of the advertising you see. If the free market was a democracy, you would vote with your remotes, and often do. TV is still, as Rob quotes, " 'a selling machine in every living room' " but you have space-age control over the machine now. A tiny little button called "mute" nullifes the billions of dollars a company like, say, Anheuser-Busch spent hiring tanned, ripped models to dance with bikini-clad women as they clutch cans of its beer. What is needed, proverbially, are ways of advertising that "can't be TiVo'd out." And that's where Rob introduces the nexus of the book, the future (and, arguably, present) of marketing, consisting of a variety of sly little methods he calls "murketing."

A mix between "murky" and "marketing," this new technique involves things like Red Bull underwriting an underground competition between a few guys on kiteboards trying to get to Cuba. It wasn't announced, and no one from Red Bull was there, but that wasn't the point. The point is that consumers respond to brands with vague, "murky" meanings, "filling in the blanks" to fit their own personal narratives. "The truth," Rob says, "is that any Red Bull drinkers, or potential drinkers, who might be impressed by the Cuba crossing are going to get exactly the message Red Bull wants them to get. People who are receptive to the idea that Red Bull's involvement makes the drink cool will decide that without additional prompting. Other Red Bull fans will never hear about it or just shrug when they do and dream up some other, murky reason to buy the next can." Murketing, in so many words, is essentially marketing in self-denial. Sponsoring bike polo games for editors and patrons of underground "zines" and, to use a more prominent example, putting brands in TV shows (otherwise known as "product placement"--think Reese's Pieces in E.T.) are murketing at its finest.

This underground non-marketing "murketing" pales in comparison to the most shocking chapter in the entire narrative: "the commercialization of chitchat." It details a marketing ("murketing"?) company called BzzAgent. Go ahead to their website right now, and you can sign up to become, of course, a BzzAgent. Anyone can do it; you don't get paid, but you can collect rewards. Rewards for what? For adopting the product of BzzAgent's latest client, and working it into casual conversation with your unsuspecting friends. An official BzzAgent's guide recommends ways to "buzz" a product: call up bookstores and casually mention that you're looking for the product you're "campaigning" for, leave little notes about a new brand of eyeliner around back room tables at work where your co-workers will see them, or, in an example that Rob cites, take Al Fresco chicken sausages to your July Fourth cookout, throw them on the grill, and tell all your friends and relatives how tasty, juicy, and fat-free they are. The "agents" then file reports, relating how their friends, neighbors, and, often, acquaintences reacted to the new product.

The entire scenario was terrifyingly close to the dystopian young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson, when the teenagers of the future all have product feeds wired into their brains (by choice--in fact, feeds are a "luxury" similar to a cell phone today), and advertising agencies that can monitor their conversations (to make them a "consumer profile" based on their words and actions and suggest relevant products for them) run hauntingly similar campaigns. In one scene, Coke says it will give out free prizes to whoever says the word "Coke" most during his or her everyday conversations, and the teens get together at parties and say the word "Coke" over and over again, vowing to win the money and split the prize. It seems relatively harmless, which is what makes it so scary, because, ultimately, it ISN'T harmless; a world where advertisers are co-opting our conversations isn't a world I ever hope to see.

And Generation Y, that hard-to-market-to Generation, is not only willing to participate in these sorts of campaigns, it's CHOMPING AT THE BIT to participate. Because for Generation Y, there's nothing wrong with branding at all; it's a fact of life. They accept it, and, more poignantly, they're willing to co-opt it for their own artistic and, of course, financial purposes. For better or for worse? The reality is complicated, and, ultimately, you have to decide.

Finally, the last section focuses on consumer ethics, and I was pleasantly surprised by how non-preachy this was. I was expecting Rob, who DOES write a column for the New York Times Magazine, a left-leaning publication, to add to the already massive cloud of smug accumulating around liberal centers and soapbox me about how evil I am to not know where my black one-piece bathing suit I'm wearing right now came from, and don't you care that there are (nameless, faceless, abstract) Chinese children laboring in sweatshops, you horrible, horrible person? But he didn't. One of the main focuses of the section is how IMPRACTICAL "eco" products really are. It will always be a "niche" market. Why not have a quietly green product that will attract a larger consumer base? Rob quotes American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, who lays it on the line: " 'That's the problem with the antisweatshop 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, appeal to people's self-interest.' " No neo-communism, no lifestyle-scolding, and, THANK GOD, no Al Gore. Walker really boosted his business creds by doing what a business writer should: Sticking to business.

As a member of Generation Y, none of this surprised me, and instead of looking down on my Generation for embracing new forms of advertising, I commend it. Maurice Chevalier once said, "I prefer old age to the alternative," the alternative being, obviously, death. Similarly, I hereby prefer advertising to the alternative: socialism. There was no marketing business, no futurists, no Proctor & Gamble, no BzzAgents in the Soviet Union, and that wasn't incidental; in fact, that was pretty much the problem. Maybe some "murketing" techniques do go too far, and maybe we don't always (or even usually) buy things for the right reasons. But the copious amounts of advertisements flickering through your attention every day, on the sides of blogs, in well-stocked supermarkets, and fifteen minutes an hour on television, while annoying, are collectively an advertisement in themselves, for a super-abundant United States of America. Perhaps it's slightly redundant (and open to satire) for you to have a choice between Dove, Caress, and Neutrogena soap when you're essentially choosing between different color packaging on the same product, but I'll take that ridiculous choice over block-long lines for one decidedly inferior loaf of bread.

Thankfully, this wasn't another "free market capitalism is evil" book (always hypocritical, since books sell on the open market). Rob was surprisingly thorough and fair, critiquing advertising (often cynically) when it was due and praising it, and the new Generation Y entrepreneurs imitating and co-opting it, when appropriate. While the information by itself is entertaining, with various anecdotes about bizarre marketing techniques to neuroscience studies, it helps immensely that Walker has a sharp wit and an effective literary voice to explain it all. Marketing, Rob says, keeping in his role of Stating The Obvious, is not going anywhere soon. It's changing, becoming more effective, and Generation Y is the first generation that is truly learning, in the spirit of "if you can't fight 'em, join 'em," to reap individual benefits from it. "Evil corporations"? Walker reminds us that Time's "Person of the Year" in 2006 was YOU, and, during the "era of the click," consumers are truly increasingly responsible for the kinds of advertising in which they participate.

Stop blaming the companies, and start looking at your own behavior, Walker implies smartly. Because, no matter what radical changes have occured in the shift from "marketing" to "murketing," YOU still have the fundamental power of consumers throughout US history, the power that all the "evil corporations" fear the most: the power to "not buy."

Use it or lose it.

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