Buying In - (Page 44) 44 rob walker Brand managers and commercial persuaders tend to look for answers in whatever it is they are trying to sell. How, they ask, can we make this thing more innovative or that brand more remarkable (or, frequently, more “cool”)? I don’t mean to suggest that they ignore the consumer. They don’t. Scrutinizing the consumer went hand in hand with mass marketing’s rise. As early as 1920, one research firm interviewed almost all the families in the town of Sabetha, Kansas, and a few years later, as historian Daniel J. Boorstin related in The Americans: The Democratic Experience, “took the first national pantry survey, based on inventories in 3,123 homes in eightyfive neighborhoods in sixteen states.” Studies of consumer preferences in the late 1920s guided the Western Clock Company to make a “smaller, thinner” clock that was “an immediate commercial success.” (Proving, as one research guru of that era observed, that “the consumer is king.” ) And so on. Today, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars studying our behavior—asking us questions, dispatching corporate ethnographers to scrutinize us in our kitchens. In recent years, they have offered to “collaborate” or “co-create” with us—by, say, letting us make design suggestions, or send in ideas for product names, or provide instant online feedback about their wares. Within the commercial persuasion industry, this sort of customer interaction is seen as a sea change, on the theory that it’s the opposite of the one-way communication of a traditional thirty-second ad. And yet, much of this really amounts to saying: “But enough about me. What do you think of me?” That’s not much of a dialogue. In the end, even today’s product makers and brand owners must— understandably, really—filter their view
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.