I buy almost nothing; therefore I am almost nothing.

Now that should really bother me, I suppose.

Well that was a dumb article. Now I need a PBR and a pack of Djarum Blacks.

Isn't this just reiterating the same arguments that were put out in various essays from the book, Commodify Your Dissent, some 15ish years ago?

I must admit I'm fascinated by this subject so I'll probably still check out at least one of these books.

Isn't it it kind of obvious that our consumer choices are a statement, or a kind of artistic expression of how we view ourselves or wish to be viewed? And isn't it also obvious that we can enjoy or master this process or be confused or controlled by it? What kind of dolts, or much more likely, charlatans, believe or pretend to believe that they only choose rationally ? Does anybody fall for that? Do they? This all seems like everyday common sense to me, not a real intellectual problem.

There's a circular argument here, I think. No matter what you buy, even if it's nothing, it reflects either a choice or a deliberate decision not to care. So in that sense, any choice, no matter how trivial, defines you. But so what? You can't *not* make choices (and if you didn't, that would be a choice, right?). So where does that get us?

I'm sure there are lots of consumer decisions I make that are irrational and reflect a successful marketing campaign that I'm not aware of. But if I deliberately resisted this, then that would presumably be attributable to some other marketing campaign. For example, if I choose not to buy brand name groceries or clothes and instead to shop at farmer's and crafts markets, that's just another "brand," just another consumer choice, right? Where does it end? It's like any totalizing ideology -- sure, you can look at everything through the lens of marketing. It doesn't get you anywhere interesting.

One of the great fallacies of marketing is to take consumer research and come up with a profile (or several) of the typical consumer(s) of your product, and then to treat that profile as though it were a description of a particular individual, or type of individual. It isn't.

It's sturdy and useful for those $20 bottles of balsamic vinegar from Whole Foods. But brands? Nah I'm too cool for that.

If you have no self-esteem you can purchase a product with a brand name to feel better about yourself.

That's why the programming attacks your self-eeteem with bad role models. It is good for business.

They sold us war, give them your money, they earned it.

Buy more stuff, vote for more war, and stay stupid. You will feel better about yourself - just BUY something for gosh sakes.

We go wrong, Walker believes, not when we express ourselves through our possessions, but when we allow our possessions to take precedence. It's all too easy for people, under the influence of the siren songs of marketing (or murketing), to drift into a situation in which they use commodities "not to reflect who they are, but to construct who they are. Not to reflect a self, but to build a self."

I wonder if Nike's buying of Converse will even make a dent in the Chuck Taylor Army's enthusiasm for their shitty shoes. I somehow doubt it, since they're the obligatory uniform of Indie Rock(tm) Dickheads and "Punk Rawk" kids everywhere, much like how Doc Martens used to be.

Always bugs me how people think a pair of shoes is shorthand for rebellion and individuality, especially when there's a whole roomful of them, slouching around, drinking their PBRs. "Oh, but my Chuckies are pink!" "Mine are olive green!" "Mine are black!" "Dude, I wrapped mine up with duct tape!" "I've owned my red ones for like 10 years." Mmm hmmm. Posers.

Livestock get branded; people shouldn't be.

Hey there,

Well, I enjoyed the article (and appreciated its not being some boiled-down 1.5 pager).

I have to admit that "Janett's" letter made me recall one night a few years ago when, after more than a few drinks among some friends, the conversation turned to sex. A few of them more-or-less labelled/defined themselves (according to their preferences/choices) when one interrupted to rather self-righteously declare "Oh, I'm just so glad I'm BEYOND all that...I gave up sex six years ago"...

and another, instantly-irritated friend replied "Oh,no....you're still SOMETHING, sweetie.....now, you're just a sort of unemployable Jesuit without a master's degree...."

Sincerely,

David "you can run, but you can't hide" Terry

There is an underlining premise to this whole discussion. You buy cool products to look cool. Or you deliberately avoid buying certain products to rebel and express your individuality. But no matter whether you are sucked in by the marketing machine or pretend, or hope, that you can avoid it, it is still all about buying and owning possessions. Things.

What has become secondary is being unique, different, or outstanding for what you DO.

How you dress or what your house or apartment looks like conveys an instant message and is obvious. Your achievements are more hidden. But more important.

Paul Fussell's "Class" examined most of these issues through a leftist economic prism years ago, minus all the bullshit about "branding." It's still apt and guaranteed to make every reader cringe with self-recognition.

It contains the funniest sentence I've ever read by Laura Miller:

And if you can't figure out whether someone is extraverted or neurotic, agreeable or cranky, by the time he invites you back to his apartment and leaves you at leisure to poke around, I suspect that either you're incorrigibly inept at judging personality or you're so drunk you don't care.

But the responses are almost better than the article. Miller's sources claim that about 70% of the populace insist they are uneffected by advertizing, despite studies which prove they are. And sure enough already about 70% of the letters here are by indignant readers who assure us advertizing has no effect on them.

Clearly it does, and the question has never been about whether advertizing in itself is a bad thing but under what circumstances advertizing is a bad thing. The shingle hanging from the door reading "Shoe-Maker" is a very good ad. It tells us what and where. When Budweiser makes the highest bid on the Superbowl year after year, and thus is the most identifiable malt beverage whatever its quality maybe there's something wrong going on.

But advertizing itself is just a way to get a product noticed and since we don't live in self-supporting agrarian communities, the need for someone in Milwakee to let someone in Santa Barbara know their product exists is just a question of fact.

I think buying a soap that is more expensive because it looks or smells good to the buyer is a great reason to choose the product—granted you have the disposable income, of course. Washing dishes is a chore, and if the time goes by more quickly or more pleasantly because you're looking at a nice bottle or taking in a pleasant aroma, why not?

My generation, GenX, thought advertizing was one of the great evils. And it sort of was, since all these corporations were shoving all this money at us trying to entice us to recklessly shove our money back at them, for no discernable good. We didn't buy Converse just because they looked great (though they did look cool: they looked like the tennis shoes of the 1950's). We bought them because they were cheap. We didn't have the same sort of cash at our disposal as the Boomers did. We weren't so much anti-materialism as we were simply practical. We also disliked advertizing because of the one-upmanship. "The cool people all buy this" the advertizers hawked. Well, no they didn't. And who wants to be judged by those standards, anyway?

That doesn't mean that when advertizing let us know a band we loved came to town or released a CD, or an interesting movie came along we didn't respond. Though we didn't fail to catch on when advertizing disappointed, and a good movie or band wasn't picked up by the national media.

Still, our refusal en masse to respond to advertizing had a major impact. After several years of trying, the advertizers just gave up. "Leave us alone," we cried. And they did. They went on to Gen Y, which was happy to lap up the products, and back to the Boomers who never thought the focus should have shifted away from themselves in the first place. We didn't exist to advertizers.

What we didn't grasp was that that meant we didn't exist to news organizations, creators of popular entertainment on a large scale, or even in the world of serious art. Because in a capitalist society, advertizing greases all the wheels. So we wrote ourselves out of existence. We always were shooting ourselves in the foot...