It’s just an extra label or logo, but we’re willing to pay big for it. Host Tess Vigeland asks journalist Rob Walker how marketers keep us so obsessed with name brands.
Walker is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.
Listen to full story at the website of the radio program Marketplace from American Public Media.
Hipsters
The author of the book mentioned above has an Amazon blog. In the blog he links to a story in Adbusters.
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.
Full article here.
I’m the.effing.librarian – do as I do.
… but I remember how much I wanted brand name sneakers when I was a kid instead of always wearing “bo-bos” (no name sneakers from Kmart or the warehouse where the poor people shopped).
and now I always have a top price for whatever I want, and I will get the best (perceived) value I can for that price, usually shopping for brand names first.
in the Adbusters article, they say, “This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation…”
Aaaaarrrgggh! When the.effing.librarian was in library school (FSU), he rode a fixed-gear bike with a wire basket mounted on the handlebars. People would point and remark, “hey, that guy has a basket on his fixrd-gear bike, but we won’t be able to decide if that’s cool for 15 more years.”
…Yeah, that’s exactly what they said.
FSU
Did you used to chain it to the rack at the south side of the Shores building.
Man, we used to point and laugh. Of course gas was not four bucks.
OK, librarians never really laughed at everybody riding a bike, but what fun is it to say that we used to stand outside and wish we could ride our bikes if it were not that we got winded walking up one flight of stairs.
you know how hard it was to find parking…
if you lived on campus, you parked your car in January and didn’t move it until April.