Buying In - (Page vii) buying in vii That’s what this book is about: the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are, and how it is changing. I use the word dialogue because what I’m talking about is not a one-way process. It’s not simply about the intrinsic elements of, say, Red Bull. It’s not just about what a product is made of or what it’s supposed to do. Nor is it just about a brand image that is invented by experts and foisted on the masses, who swallow it whole. Any product or brand that catches on in the marketplace does so because of us: because enough of us decided that it had value or meaning and chose to participate. Because of the dialogue between consumer and consumed. I use the word secret because the way that dialogue plays out is anything but explicit. It’s complex, subtle, and sometimes misleading. And I suggest that it’s changing because in the years since my trip to Miami Beach, where I first puzzled over how we choose to quench our thirsts, real and metaphorical, that secret dialogue has gotten murkier than ever. Back then, the mechanics of marketing was a new subject for me. I was writing about advertising for the online magazine Slate, but strictly from a consumer point of view, treating ads more as an extension of pop culture than as a business. My reporting on Red Bull involved the first of what would become many examinations of product or brand success, looking at both the buyers and the sellers. And it turned out to be an interesting moment to start paying attention to the relationship between the commercial persuasion industry and the rest of us. Soon the steady march of progress that had been reshaping media and technology for years broke into a sprint, through the rapid rise of devices and innovations like TiVo, the iPod, increasingly sophisticated cell phones, YouTube,
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