Buying In - (Page 46) 46 rob walker ing to do with commercial culture or brands: a wedding ring, a crucifix, a patch referring to a particular division of the army, a bumper sticker praising one’s home state, and so on. But as the title of his book indicates, Zaltman is addressing an audience that’s interested in people as customers—and in addition to his Harvard credentials, he’s the cofounder of a research firm called Olson Zaltman Associates. This chapter draws mostly on work from researchers who study human behavior, as opposed to consumer behavior. But it also draws on the work of others who, like Zaltman, have a particular focus on commercial persuasion and on why we buy what we buy. Given th effort they are putting into figuring us out, we may as well try to figure us out, too. the interpreter In the 1950s, a suburban housewife named Marian Keech made a bold prediction: An enormous flood was going to destroy the world. She named a specific date, and she named her source: aliens from the planet Clarion. These aliens had also informed her, she said, that she and her followers would be rescued from this calamity and spirited away in flying saucers. Keech was not a publicity seeker. She an her followers were secretive. They were not recruiting, perhaps because it would have been bad form to show up for the saucer escape with too many people. In any case, she believed what she believed. But she was wrong. There was no flood. There were no flying saucers. Keech did not, however, simply admit that she was wrong. Instead, she and her followers offered a face-saving explanation, the details of which are not particularly compelling. What
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