Buying In - (Page xv) buying in xv ple. In one informal poll, 77 percent of those who were asked said that they are more aware of such efforts than most people are; 61 percent said their knowledge of persuasion techniques is above average; and 66 percent said they are better critical thinkers than their typical peer. If these respondents are correct, then most people are more clever than most people. Clearly a lot of the respondents are wrong. But still, some of us must be better critical thinkers than others. And here I have to admit something. Having spent years as a journalist focused on marketing and consumption, and having seen an awful lot of evidence that didn’t really match up with what marketers were saying about how hard it was to sell anything these days, I still believed that I was different. But there was one specific incident that finally made me reconsider what I thought I knew about consumers, marketers, and even myself. This was the news that Nike had bought Converse. As a business journalist, I’m in awe of Nike, one of the extraordinary success stories of modern capitalism. As a consumer, well, it’s not my kind of thing. To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated, a symbol for suckers who take its “Just Do It” bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Cobain wore. So I found the buyout disheartening, and I wasn’t alone: Shortly after the deal was announced, The Washington Post interviewed various dismayed anarchists and college students who vowed never to wear Chucks again.
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