If you’re interested in how certain
brands take on personalities of their own beyond their framers’ intent--or in the
self-conscious denial of any intent at all--a recently published book deserves
your attention. Buying In: the Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who
We Are, by Rob Walker, examines how certain brands come to embody what we
say to ourselves about ourselves, but with no apparent
acknowledgement of a surrounding brand community of any sort. In other words, individuals
embrace many of these brands with no conscious pretension to belonging, seemingly
because the brand has individual meaning for them alone. Or so they think.
All this may seem to run
counter to the proposition that brand contagion is fueled by social networks.
But the examples Walker cites don’t diverge all that much from this model. And while he’s a little
snarky about notions like co-creation, that turns out to be pretty much the
phenomenon he’s examining. Many of his keystone cases--Converse sneakers, Pabst
Blue Ribbon beer, and Timberland boots among hip-hop devotees—are brands that have
prospered through diffusion force fields that are, at least initially, invisible
to the “commercial persuaders” behind the brand.
And all of them,
paradoxically, seem to emerge from a distinctive peer-to-peer energy that is
militantly brand-averse, a kind of anti-matter in the branding universe
detectable only through its effects. Clearly we’re not in the realm of mass
market brands here. Still, Walker’s
take on brand contagion--not to mention his vivid coverage of the
individual entrepreneurs and early adopters behind the brands—make this a most
valuable read for anyone, and especially for “commercial persuaders.”
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