Buying In - (Page 5) buying in 5 ing him sound like a cynic, but that’s not the case. He’s a smart guy with a lot of hustle; he has the highest standards, the greatest expectations, the biggest dreams. He’s the new consumer, the nightmare of the brand managers and retail buyers who make Magic hum. We’ll spend more time with him later; but for now, all you need to know is that when Bobby Hundreds looked around Magic, it was with a knowing smirk. He saw through the whole charade—just as the experts said he should. All these brands have no meaning; each one was, he said, “just another clothing line.” If brands and logos are mere symbols, empty of meaning, then choosing among clothing lines—or anything—becomes a largely rational affair. There are probably four, or maybe four and a half, factors to consider. One, of course, is price. Another is convenience. A third is quality. The fourth rational factor, I think it’s fair to say, is pleasure. The half factor is ethics, which I’ll leave aside for now but return to later, in this book’s final section. Needless to say, these ideas not only collide, but bleed into one another: You can derive pleasure from the simple fact of a bargain’s low price, for example. To borrow a term from economics, the goal of the rational consumer is to “maximize utility”—the usefulness, or satisfaction, a consumer derives from a given purchase. A vacuum cleaner that does a nice job on your carpets is both useful and satisfying (assuming you want your carpets clean); a vacuum cleaner that leaves the carpet looking just as filthy as it did before you bought the thing probably isn’t. It’s a simple enough framework for decision making, one that marginalizes squishier ideas like brand image. It’s also consistent with what twenty-first-century consumers tell sur-
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.