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

  • Rob Walker, New York Times; Kirsten Wiley, Microsoft

Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Weaned on TiVo, the Internet and other emerging technologies, the short-attention-span generation has become immune to marketing. Consumers are in control…or so we’re told.

Yet as technology has created avenues for advertising everywhere and anywhere, people are embracing brands more than ever before and participating in marketing campaigns for their favorite brands in unprecedented ways. Increasingly, motivated consumers are pitching in to spread the gospel virally, whether by creating internet video ads for Converse All Stars or becoming word-of-mouth agents touting products to friends and family on behalf of huge corporations. In the process, they have begun to funnel cultural, political and community activities through connections with brands, and as buyers are adopting products not just as consumer choices, but as conscious expressions of their identities.

Speaker Details

Rob Walker writes the weekly column “Consumed”, a blend of business journalism and cultural anthropology for The New York Times Magazine. Previously he created and wrote the “Ad Report Card” column for Slate, and has contributed to a wide range of publications, from Fast Company to The New Republic and others. Under the pseudonym R. Walker he has written a number of satirical comic books set in the business world and collected in the book Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money and Business. Walker continues to write about the dialogue between consumerism and identity on his blog www.murketing.com/journal/.

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