>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon everybody and welcome. My name is Kim Ricketts
and I manage along with Kirsten Wiley the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker series.
Today we welcome Rob Walker to Microsoft Research to discuss with us his thoughts on
what marketing means to us today, what works, what doesn't, and, most interestingly,
why.
In our current world of TiVo and YouTube and craigslist and MySpace, what marketing
is and isn't has become murky, or what Rob terms "murketing." And he takes us on a
visit to this new consumer world, that hazy mysterious place where sometimes,
sometimes magic happens and people embrace a brand or a product in such a way as to
make traditional marketing obsolete and irrelevant.
Rob dissects that magic a little bit for us today and takes us on a tour through this new
world, and it's also collected in his new book, Buying In, and in his regular Consumed
column, of which I'm an avid reader, in the New York Times Magazine.
So please join me in welcoming Rob Walker to Microsoft Research.
(Applause.)
>> Rob Walker: Thank you. Hello. So let's see if there's a microphone on. Yes?
People can hear me? Okay.
Thank you all so much for coming out, especially on a drop-dead beautiful day when it
would be so much more pleasant to just sit there and stare at the sun than to stare at me.
So I'm going to talk about -- I'm going to talk a little bit about sort of why I wrote the
book, and then I'm going to read a little bit from it and try to, as best I can, draw some
conclusions of some interest, you know, within the confines of just really having a
relatively short amount of time to work with.
I have a small favor to ask. This is always a judgment call, and in this audience I'm going
to go ahead and make the judgment that I'm going to do it. My wife some years ago -- or
about a year ago introduced me to the work of a photographer called Tim Davis, who has
a great Web site, davistim.com. And one of the excellent projects on his Web site is a
project called "My Audience." And he takes a picture every time he talks to a group. He
takes a picture of his audience, and I thought that was such a great idea and the pictures
are great. And I was like, oh, how can I steal that? I really like that. And so the way I
came up with to steal the idea and also to not have to deal with the possibility of asking
anyone for permission to use their likeness on my Web site is that I ask everyone to just
briefly, if you could, just obscure your face. And this is -- boy, I got -- it's a tough angle
here. All right. So look at me over here but obscure your face. Everybody has to do it.
Please obscure your -- come on. Thank you so much.
So is it -- you can tell it's a tough crowd when some people are like, I'm not doing it, I'm
not going to obscure my face. All right. So that's that.
Well, so a lot -- are people familiar with the Consumed column? Some? Okay. And
with murketing.com? Just a Web site of mine. Okay. So the book is similar in theme to
all that stuff. What I write about is consumer culture and consumer behavior. And I've
been doing that now for I guess close to eight years. And I should mention that I started
by writing for Slate, which -- or I started on this subject for writing for Slate, which, of
course, used to be a Microsoft property. So I used to get checks, Microsoft checks all the
time. And that was really jarring for me the first time I got a check from Microsoft. It
really seemed like getting a check from the government or something.
But Slate was great to me, and so I've been to this campus a few times on -- when we
would have retreats. And in those days what I was writing was the Ad Report Card
column, which still exists. It's written by someone else. And in those days I was really
functioning just essentially as a critic of advertising in the sense that I was just judging it.
But the premise of that column was that advertising is part of popular culture. It's part of
culture. It's part of American culture and should be just evaluated in that way as opposed
to sort of from a trade magazine point of view of who got the business and who the
agency is and all that kind of stuff.
And that general idea has stuck with me throughout all the work I've done since, although
I subsequently started moving into doing stories where I was spending time with
marketers and designers and product makers and all kinds of experts in the process. But
always in the writing I was trying to keep the consumer in mind, because it's very easy to
get caught up in the one side of the equation.
Which leads to the subtitle of the book is The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and
Who We Are. And that's generally my theme. And I figured it would be useful to just
define it. And since I defined it so well here in the book, I'm just going to read you two
paragraphs. The book is about the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are
and how it's 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, the Zune. Okay, it
doesn't say the Zune in the book; it says something else. It's not just about what a product
is made of or what it's supposed to do, nor is it about a brand image that's 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. And I use the word "secret" because the way that 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 I've been writing about this stuff, that secret
dialogue has in my view gotten murkier than ever.
So it's no huge insight to say that it's been changing. Everybody knows, we've all lived
through the past eight years, there's been sort of in addition to the Web, in particular in
the advertising world, just the announcement of TiVo was a huge incident basically, that
this thing was going to -- this piece of technology was going to give us this power to zap
past ads was seen as a huge and empowering thing and certainly a marker of some kind
of big change.
So I got interested in trying to -- in thinking about writing a book that would be about,
well, what is the big picture of change, not just the sort of incremental day-to-day thing
that I was covering in each little column or article that I was writing.
So what's the nature of that change? Well, here's -- let me give you one point of view on
that. Just a couple paragraphs. Or just one paragraph. Here's what it says: The
dimensions of the latest trends in consumer behavior were outlined in an overview in the
Harvard Business Review. This new zeitgeist, the august publication explained, is being
fuelled by, quote, the efforts of consumers themselves who have lately become articulate.
One of the defining features of this fresh paradigm is the new consumers' demand for
information, quotes. They're banning together, becoming, quote, better educated and
better organized with a growing familiarity with the mechanics of advertising and the
endless range of gimmicky sales tactics. They have suffered from deceptive and stupid
advertising long enough. That's a quote. And it is only inevitable that power should shift
to them in an economy that is moved from scarcity to abundance. These changes, this
article summarized, have tended to make consumers more critical and to enhance their
importance.
And this was the state of things in 1939, which is when that article was written. And
that's one of many times over the course of writing and consumers that this observation
has been brought out that, oh, they're smarter than they used to be and they're more wise
to the ways of advertising than they used to be and they have more power than they used
to have.
During this particular wave of it, there are other quotations here from Business Week.
And this -- my favorite one is from Advertising Age in 1940 which declared that this new
consumer is the major problem for business and that most advertising and merchandising
men see this new consumer as, quote, an incomprehensible ogre.
Now, you're not going to catch Advertising Age using language like that anymore, but
you will catch them giving you that basic insight as essentially what's supposed to be new
and different about today. And obviously I don't think that is new and different. I think
that as long as there's been advertising, there's been skepticism about advertising. And as
long as there's been skepticism about advertising, there's been ad experts complaining
about consumers not going along with the program. So that's not new.
So if that's not new, then what is? Well, that's what ultimately I'm writing about in the
book. And let me give you just a little bit of additional context, and then I'll read you one
section. The way that I view it, there are essentially just in a really basic level, I think,
four and a half, I like to say, factors, rational factors that guide a purchase decision, and
those would be price, quality, convenience, pleasure, and then this half factor, which is
consumer ethics, which I'll come back to and talk about more at the end. And that sounds
like a pretty good rational framework, those factors. But the problem is what? The
problem is that if you really look at the reality of the marketplace, it's pretty hard to make
decisions based just on those factors.
And as an example, a while ago Consumer Reports did a rundown of evaluating kitchen
stoves and ranges. Pretty mundane object. 53 different choices were available. They
evaluated all 53. They found that all 53 were either good, very good or excellent. So, in
other words, there's not a lot of differentiation. It's pretty hard to choose if you're just
going to go on the basis of price, quality, convenience, and pleasure. I call in the book
the pretty good problem, there's a tremendous amount of pretty good stuff out there. And
I think you can replicate that. I mean, you can pick up any issue of Consumer Reports
and find whatever they're evaluating that week. There's not a huge amount -- there's not a
lot of, like, terrible stuff. Most stuff is just -- it's pretty good. So how do you make it
stand out? It's a problem for both sides of the equation. It's a problem for the consumer;
it's hard to choose. It's a problem for the business; how do you stand out.
One of the interesting examples in the realm of ranges is the Viking range which, you
know, has tremendous name recognition. It has tremendous brand power. And this is
one of the ways that the pretty good problem gets resolved, is through branding. And
branding, people sometimes -- maybe not this audience, but sometimes when I talk about
branding, people think that I just mean like a logo or a slogan or an ad. Branding is the
process of attaching an idea to something, a thing, a product. And that idea a hundred
years ago might have been something as straightforward as quality and consistency; that
Pillsbury flour, you know that brand name and you know that it's going to be reliable and
trustworthy in a way that the unmarked flour in your local market might not be.
Well, over time as the marketplace has become more and more cluttered, the ideas
attached to the products have become more and more elaborate and aggressive and big.
And as an example, I would suggest the Dove campaign for -- which takes the form of
making a statement about the nature of beauty, which is a pretty big idea to attach to a
line of lotions and face creams and whatnot.
And that idea can get attached to a product or a thing not just by marketers as in the case
of the Dove campaign, but also by us. And what's interesting is that we're more willing
to attach bigger ideas, in my view, to brands than we used to. And in some ways the
Viking range is actually a small example of that, because if you're curious, it didn't really
fare that well in Consumer Reports' breakdown. It was sort of in the middle even among
high-end ranges. Nevertheless, it has some kind of brand power that some experts have
suggested that it's about -- speaks to a kind of self-expression thing that we feel like it
expresses kind of a creativity and for the home cook that they need a restaurant-quality
stove. Which is an interesting line of thought until you learn the shockingly high
percentage of Viking ranges installed in homes that are never used. So something else is
going on there.
So here's a little passage from the book that people have reacted to, so I like to use it as a
good example of what I'm calling murketing. At Alberta Park in northeast Portland,
about a hundred serious bicyclists, most of them young men, many tattooed and pierced,
and at least one wearing striped tights and a floral thrift shop dress, arrived en masse on a
Saturday evening.
They gathered near a fenced-off, hard-top court and in teams of
three began a bike polo tournament. Almost all were bike messengers, about a third of
them local. The rest came from Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. And they lived up
to the image of couriers as marginal testosterone-charged troublemakers. They drank
beer, they smoked cigarettes, among other things, and they yelled profane insults at one
another. These rowdy bike messengers slugging their beer from 40-ounce bottles and
smashing into one another in their bike polo matches did not seem the sort to play any
kind of role in the creation of brand meaning. They seemed like a variation of the outlaw
archetype, willful outsiders indifferent to rules and norms. With the creatively
reconfigured bikes -- with their creatively reconfigured and customized bikes they were
authentic and alive, and as far removed from the rigid world of commercial persuasion as
it is possible to be. And they seem not just indifferent to the culture to brand and
materialism, but hostile to it.
But what appeared to be an unlawful party in the park was, in fact, part of the West Side
Invite, prizes for which were underwritten by a $1,750 contribution from the Pabst
Brewing Company. Curiously there were no banners or signs announcing the
beermaker's role in their fun and no one from Pabst was on site to glad-hand the bikers.
PBR, as fans call it, was in the midst of a highly unlikely comeback, and the unruly bike
messenger subculture had something to do with that.
This was in around 2003 or -4 when I was on hand for this. And PBR had been in a long
sales decline from about 1975 to 2001. Year after year after year sales had gone down.
And then in 2002, for reasons that escape the company, sales rose. They didn't know
what was going on. They rose -- the growth started and was most pronounced in
Portland, a city best known in the cosmology of beer as a haven for fancy craft offerings.
There the lowbrow brew had risen to the No. 5 ranked beer in town, the fastest going of
the top 50 domestic beers. In local supermarket sales it trailed only Coors Light,
Budweiser, Bud Light, and Corona.
At first they say even the people at Pabst which had barely advertised for more than 20
years were at a loss. The trend-explaining industry framed the rise of PBR as part of an
alleged retro-chic movement. A subset white-trash theory linked PBR to Levi's, whose
sales had actually fallen, and trucker hats, the fad that was revealed and snuffed out
almost simultaneously when Ashton Kutcher wore one on his MTV show, Punk'd.
The job of finding a less ethereal explanation, one that Pabst Brewing Company could
actually do something about, fell to Neal Stewart. Stewart was a baby-faced 27-year-old
when he joined Pabst as a divisional marketing manager in the summer of 2000. At the
time their marketing amounted to some low-grade car racing sponsorships, country music
events and fishing promotions.
But a sales rep in Portland had noticed that what he called "these alternative people" were
starting to get into the brand. So Stewart went to Portland to visit bars where PBR was
selling. He dropped by the Lutz Tavern near Reed College. Slumming students here
used to drink a brand called Blitz, a low-priced, locally brewed brand that went out of
business in 1999. That year the owner of the Lutz Tavern decided to start selling cans of
Pabst for a dollar as a summer special. And years later the sale still wasn't over and PBR
was the bar's top seller. Stewart then braved the Ash Street Saloon, a bike messenger
hangout downtown. Portland messengers had also favored Blitz, again, because it was
cheap, and they had switched to PBR too. And the interesting thing about this was that
the common theme among all these people who were embracing the brand seemed to be
that they were young, smart, and often skeptical types, precisely the kind of people who
can't be fooled by marketing and, in fact, tend to detest it.
The beer industry spends about a billion dollars a year on marketing. And that's almost
entirely image-based marketing, which is not surprising because tests have found that
even hard-core fans, self-identifying hard-core fans of Budweiser and Miller Genuine
Draft by and large can't tell them apart in blind taste tests.
So PBR didn't have any image, it was just there. And the single key text to Neal Stewart,
to pass marketers' codification of the meaning that was being formed for PBR in the
marketplace, the key text for him was of all things No Logo, the book by journalist and
commentator Naomi Klein. No Logo had presented an argument about branding and
marketing overload, bullying and rapacious mind-set that this trend represented and
evidence of a grass-roots backlash against it, especially among young people.
Klein's view was that this would feed a new wave of activists who targeted corporations,
and Neal Stewart's view was that the book contained many good marketing ideas. He
said it totally articulated the feelings, the coming feelings of the consumer out there that
eventually people are going to get sick of all this stuff, all this marketing, and say enough
is enough. So the traditional response to the discovery that alternative people, whatever
that means, were getting into the brand which would be, say, taking out 30 -- taking out
ads on alternative radio stations was nixed. And so was any other regular form of
advertising. And instead, so what does that leave, what that leaves is things like cash
payments to rowdy bike messengers who want to screw around in the park but who don't
want to deal with banners or company reps getting in the way. And it's striking how
many of PBR's many relationships like this were actually initiated by the representative
of some subculture approaching Pabst.
Stewart didn't court the bike messengers of Portland. One of them approached him with
the idea. Later he heard from other messenger groups in New York and elsewhere.
Other sponsorship requests were relayed to him through contacts at undergroundish
magazines like Vice and Arthur. Each little sponsorship effort -- skateboard movie
screenings, art galleries, independent publishers -- expanded the network.
Now, a year or so after Stewart took his trip to Portland I took one. I was met there by
Scott Proctor who a few months earlier had joined Pabst as its Oregon sales manager. A
beer business veteran, he referred to bars as accounts. He remembered Pabst having a
minute base in Portland. In '99 the company had just 41 accounts in the city. Five years
later the number was more than ten times that. Proctor was 48, affable, and openly
baffled by the weird PBR base. "I've been in some different accounts than I would
normally see if I was going to have a beverage myself," he remarked. "I had to open up
my mind a little bit."
Now, just before my visit the Portland alternative paper, Willamette Week, which you
probably are familiar with, had run a big picture of a guy drinking a PBR at the Lutz
Tavern with a blurb that mocked middle-class, college-educated, salaried, Portland
hipsters for drinking PBR. "It's totally not indie rock, so there," the magazine said. So I
was curious if there was a backlash underway. So we visited the Lutz Tavern. It was a
homey place with a pool table and an apple-green linoleum bar top. As "Planet Claire"
played on the jukebox, the bartender and a few post-college-aged patrons, all of them
young women, all of them drinking cans of PBR, mulled the state of the brand for my
benefit.
They promptly brought up the no advertising factor, and while the subject of poseurs
treating the beer as a fashion accessory came up, it didn't really seem like that much of a
problem and, in fact, they encourage us to eat down the block at a place that sold
southern-style food and, for $3, 40-ounce PBRs in a small bucket of ice.
When we drove through the Hawthorne neighborhood, every bar seemed to have a PBR
sign. In the Fred Meyer grocery store there, there was more shelf space in the cooler for
PBR than for Budweiser. It was like a parallel universe. And later without Proctor I
went to Alberta Park to check out the bike polo shenanigans. Ryan Kelley, a
comparatively mild-mannered messenger who actually arranged for the first PBR
sponsorship, allowed that the beer's newfound popularity was slightly annoying but,
"Basically," he said, "we're going to drink whatever beer costs a dollar." Another rider,
Tad Bamford, sweaty with big hoop earrings and an open cut on his elbow, looked at me
as if I were a fool when I asked him whether PBR's trendiness might cause him to
abandon the drink. "Yeah, I know all about that," he paused, "and I couldn't care less."
He seemed to be finished with me at that point, so I moved on.
And eventually I ended up at the dank and scruffy Ash Street Saloon where I met a
28-year-old named Phil Barnes who had recently gone through four tattoo sessions to get
a Pabst logo about a foot square burned into his back, which he showed me. "Pabst is
part of my subculture," he said emphatically. "It's the only beer I think about." He was a
skateboarder, worked as a cook, and described his peer group as, quote, scumbag punk
rockers. Barnes is a little cagey about talking to me at first because his friends had
worried that somehow a picture of his tattoo would be used to promote Pabst and he
wouldn't be compensated. Eventually, however, he did talk to me and he noted that he
had never seen a Pabst ad of any sort, which he liked because it showed that, quote,
they're not insulting you, unquote. Barnes had also seen that Willamette Week item
making fun of PBR drinkers, and he'd given it some thought. He concluded that he didn't
care. "The only thing that's going to stop me from drinking Pabst is when I die," he said,
lighting a cigarette.
So I use that example because this word "murketing" refers to both sides of the dialogue
and what's changed. Because when I look at what's changed, one thing is these kinds of
tactics, like instead of here's an ad, here's the pitch, here's the product, here's why it's
good, here's who should have it, what we have is a lot more tactics along the lines of let's
just sponsor some people who we think are interesting and good evangelists for the brand
doing something. It's a very sort of -- it's like, is that advertising? There's no sign, there's
sort of clearly they got some goodwill benefits from it as the word spread among that
subculture and then eventually to people who emulated that subculture.
Clearly PBR's decision-making process was partly driven by the fact that they really
didn't have that much money to work with. But very similar murky tactics involving
event marketing, involving all kinds of Internet marketing, all kinds of word-of-mouth
marketing are used by now massive brands: Red Bull, Axe is one that's in the book. And
the net effect that people don't talk about as much when they talk about the effect of new
technology on this dialogue, they talk about how it empowers consumers and they ignore
how much in my view it empowered marketers. And what I mean by that is it broke
marketers out of the box of, well, we can only be in this place. And it forced them to say,
we have to be somewhere else, where can we be. And the answer turned out to be
everywhere, as we're learning I think every day.
But the murketing idea also encompasses the other side of that equation, which is why I
use the PBR story as my little example, because the core idea for this new meaning of
PBR was not cooked up at Pabst Brewing headquarters; it was cooked up by consumers.
PBR certainly reacted to it and came up with their own ways to amplify it, which another
brand I talk about in the book is Timberland, which also had its brand meaning redefined
by consumers in ways that it did not understand and at first resisted and resisted for some
years before finally essentially capitulating to what the marketplace had decided its
product was about.
So that's what murketing refers to, that whole change. And that's what I think has
happened, is that because of all the things I've talked about, the possibilities of brand
meaning have gotten deeper into our lives and into -- both in ways that we kind of want
to resist and in ways that we -- whether we know it or not -- embrace.
And I wrote the book to try to pull back the curtain on that process, on both sides of that
process, both the professional side of it, what the -- how the industry works, and also the
sort of psychological side of it, how our own mind works. But I'm not just doing this to
complain or to be a drag. I'm doing it because I think that as much as people will sort of
protest and say, oh, brands aren't that big a deal, you're oversaying the whole thing. It's
just -- it's just stuff, it's not that important. We all know that actually our consumer
behavior is quite important. And we're reminded of it a lot lately because of all the
attention that goes to the various environmental issues. Our decisions have real
consequences in the world. They also have real consequences in our lives. They have
consequences in terms of what you buy, it seems like it will be satisfying at first, maybe a
Viking range, and then six months, a year later, like why did I buy that? And meanwhile
you're trying to -- instead of really asking yourself that question, you're buying something
else.
This brings me around to this idea of consumer ethics that I mentioned as the half factor
earlier. I only give it a half factor because as much as we all -- and survey after survey
shows that people will say, yes, I care about, I do want to buy environmentally-sound
products, I do want to buy sweat shop-free products, I do want to buy, what I term
broadly, ethical products. The data also show, however, we don't. We really don't do it.
80 percent of people will say that they want that, maybe 10 to 12 percent of marketplace
activity is really guided by that. Why is that? I think some of it is people will say
anything to pollsters that they think pollsters want to hear. And I think some of it is the
marketplace isn't set up that way. There's a famous sort of question that they'll ask about
would you pay $4 more for a T-shirt that wasn't made -- that you know wasn't made in a
sweat shop, and people overwhelmingly say yes. Well, step into your local department
store and try to find the bin where it says here's the $16 T-shirt that's possibly from a
sweat shop and here's the $20 one that's definitely not. Marketplace doesn't work that
way. Marketplace works exactly the opposite way, which is that every marketer out there
is trying very specifically to give you a shortcut so that you're not stopping to reflect and
think about that stuff, you're just saying, yeah, nice T-shirt, pleasure from this T-shirt, or
good price on that T-shirt or whatever. And brand meaning is another way to sort of have
a shortcut there. So what I'm trying to give readers with the book is some information
about how to think about this so that they'll be able to make the decisions they really want
to make.
In terms of what I have to say to business, in a lot of ways it's that we're in a really
interesting time with this stuff right now because clearly businesses in general recognize
that there's a kind of consumer hunger out there for this ethical stuff, this -- whether it's
the planet, people are uneasy and they're nervous about how their consumer patterns are
affecting the world, and a lot of companies are reacting to it with image changes, with
here's -- let's change the packaging to really highlight this one good aspect of our product,
it's -- whatever it is. It could be it's organic, it's low fat, it's -- just anything that sounds
kind of good, a portion -- if the word -- the last refuge is always a portion of proceeds go
to something that is worthwhile. And not a lot of thought is going into changing business
practices to look at what are the worst practices that we're doing and how can those be
changed.
I talk in the book about American Apparel as a company that I know a lot of people don't
like because it has kind of this raunchy public image. But one of the things that I think is
overlooked in the story of American Apparel is that while it did transition away from its
original sweat shop-free image and into this new sort of sex image, it didn't change its
practices. And, in fact, the workers there make more money and have more benefits than
they did back in the days when they were pushing the sweat shop-free image. And I
think there's a good lesson in that about the importance -- and there are consumers of
American Apparel who are attracted to the better known stuff, but there are other
consumers who know perfectly well what's going on with the ethical practices of the
company. And I think it was a good lesson from that company, the importance of
business practice over sort of trying to tout the halo effect of whatever it is that, you
know -- it's not about imagery, it's about reality.
The last thing I'll say is that there's a -- the book kind of rounds out on a discussion of the
crafting and DIY sort of handmade movement, which I think is a really interesting sort of
subset of consumer culture right now that has tremendous amount of interesting potential
and I think is really responding to this desire that people have to get past the image thing.
It's image driven on some ways, all these young people brand themselves, but there's
thousands and thousands of them selling on etsy.com and so on. And they really bring
something new to the dialogue about material culture. And they're not doing it quite in
the form of resisting it, because it's about material culture; they're selling stuff. But
they're trying to on some level refocus the dialogue and move it in the direction that
consumers might want it to move in. And rather than reacting to the dialogue that
someone else has started.
So that's what I have to say. I'm very happy to answer as many questions as you would
like. Does anyone have any questions? Yes, sir, in back.
>>: When in your mind did branding (inaudible)? I'm sure you can look back over the
20th Century and see things, particularly the more premium brands, Cadillacs and so
forth, more Cartiers, people established this sort of premium stuff. It seems like there
was a point (inaudible) maybe in the 1980s or maybe earlier where (inaudible) people
started -- brands became almost like celebrities (inaudible) commonly discussed and
acknowledged, people became self-aware of it, young people started their own reactions
to brands. Whereas before the relationship was much simpler. Take, like I say, rock
bands that had any tint of commercial association were sell-outs and now it's so
massively inverted. Where for you were the inflection points and what's driven that?
>> Rob Walker: Well, I think that there probably have been a series of inflection points,
and I think it's probably been a gradual process. And the inflection point I guess that I'm
dealing with in this book of this sort of 21st Century era is that each one builds on what
happened before. So by the time we got to this new world that we're in now, a lot of the
stuff that you're talking about had definitely happened. And there's probably a
generational factor to some extent in that every generation grows up more thoroughly
soaked in the idea that brands are important or that brands are legitimate than the prior
generation.
And I don't actually necessarily reject the idea. I'm not saying brands don't matter at all
really; I'm saying that it's just useless -- I'm saying, in fact, that it's useless to take that
point of view. Because clearly brands do matter in the culture and it's important to kind
of almost embrace that so you can figure out brand to brand, well, what does this thing
really stand for, does it really stand for something that I believe in or does it just stand for
something that I kind of vaguely want to be associated with.
And so one of the most surprising things to me about -- I definitely agree that sort of at
like in the music realm it's harder and harder to find anyone who will criticize an indie
band for doing a deal with Converse or whoever. However, one of the things that
surprised me about this book, because I did obviously go looking to spend time with sort
of younger, skeptical, savvy people on the kind of cutting edge, and what I found, that
there was a really interesting subculture of such people who what they were doing was
instead of creating -- they were just the kind of people who would start a band, but
instead what they were doing was, in fact, starting their own brands.
I talk about an example -- a couple of examples in the book are The Hundreds and
Barking Irons, both happen to be T-shirt brands which I picked because a T-shirt is such
a sort of empty commodity, like it doesn't -- a T-shirt doesn't really -- it's very hard to
distinguish between you put out five black T-shirts, they kind of all look the same. If you
put a Ramones logo on one and a Nike logo on another one, they're two totally different
objects. And you probably will have a reaction to which one you would be willing to
wear, or if you prefer the blank one. And these kids had figured that out and they were
figuring out, well, if brands are something that really can have that kind of meaning, it
can really express an idea, if the Ramones logo expresses an idea, let's do that, but let's
not bother to be the Ramones, let's just go with the logo side of it, let's just go with the
creating of brand power and let's play with that. Which is that's the inflection point that
I'm dealing with in this book. Which I think is a new era beyond, you know, the '80s.
Does that make sense?
>>: Yes, but I want to ask a follow-up. You said -- do you really believe that -- you said
it doesn't matter -- do you really believe that it really does matter, that we as individuals
need to be concerned with differentiating amongst brands or is it (inaudible) to the
marketers that brands matter and it's really -- in a sense it's a false dialogue at a certain
level. We could go back to your four pillars of purchasing and say, well, if it meets these
other needs, we don't have to (inaudible) importance and relevance in our social life.
>> Rob Walker: I'm not saying you have to accept on face value what a brand is
projecting, but I think that it's pretty important to recognize that brands have power in the
culture and that coming into the marketplace with an attitude of, like, none of that stuff
matters, I'm above it all and it doesn't affect me is pretty much the worst possible
mind-set you could be in. Because whether you're consciously -- I don't suggest that
anyone consciously thinks, like -- gets up in the morning and says, you know, I want to
be an individual so I'm going to go buy, you know, an iPod because that's a really
individual -- Apple is a really individualistic brand. No one does that. And I wouldn't
suggest that. It's something that's happening on an unconscious level. And it's absolutely
happening. And you can sort of say, like, nah, it doesn't affect me, I do everything based
on these rational factors. I think that's a bad -- I think that's the wrong attitude to have
because it is affecting you. And if you don't think about it, it's more likely to have more
effect on you as a result. That's just my -- that's my view. I'm going to ask you a
question.
>>: Do you have a -- like a personal turning point in your relationship with brands and
identity?
>> Rob Walker: Um-hmm. That's funny you should ask. Yeah. I mentioned Converse
just in passing then. There was a period where I was definitely falling exactly into the
category of the person I was just describing of I was totally above it all and -- I mean, I'm
a journalist, so I have to have distance between myself and the subject matter. I was
writing about branding, I was writing about marketing, but I definitely saw it as, like,
studying the ants and what they were up to and it had nothing to do with me. And then
there was a moment that was actually sort of critical to the decision and certainly to the
reporting -- the decision to write and everything I did in writing the book when Nike
bought Converse. I'm an admirer of Nike as a journalist, as a business journalist. I think
it's one of the most amazing capitalist success stories ever. As a consumer, no offense to
anyone who's wearing Nike things, I would not wear the swoosh if you paid me to. It's
just a little bit sort of -- it's just too much of a kind of mark of it's oppressive, it's
everywhere, enough already, I'm sick of that thing, I don't want to be involved.
So I had always worn Converse sneakers, though, from about the age of 15. And, again, I
had never had a moment where I -- there was never any time during that period when I
woke up and thought, I'm wearing Converse sneakers so I can identify with my rebel
heros, such as the Ramones, or whatever. Like that never happened. But somehow I
realized that I was having this crisis about whether or not I could wear -- I could continue
to wear Converse sneakers if it was owned by Nike. And this in turn made me realize
that if brands were so meaningless and I was above it all, why was I having an existential
crisis about the meaning of a brand. And it had a big effect on everything that I did after
that. Because I decided there must be something to this stuff.
Now, having said that, I want to just mention that the person who asked me this question
now is actually a confederate, that question was planted, so don't trust anybody. Thank
you.
Yes, in the back.
>>: I have to disclose that I work in advertising, so I'll qualify that. In our practice we
feel that the best advertising is word of mouth, which is really kind of no advertising at
all. And I think in your Portland story, the PBR and how that spread to other cities,
perhaps one of the unstated factors in that was the Internet, communication of -- among
bike messengers from one city to another. And I'm curious as to what thoughts you've
given to the emergence of digital television in terms of consumer power and that
relationship.
>> Rob Walker: What about digital television? What would be the aspect of digital
television that would ->>: The ability for people to have more selective power with how they interact with
content and they begin to drive.
>> Rob Walker: Uh-huh. And what is your tie-in to that and word of mouth, just so I
answer this the right way? Or are those two different points?
>>: Digital television has the potential to be Internet-like. So maybe that's a secondary
factor. But I guess my question for you is, is digital television going to increase
consumers' power to drive these kind of brand movements?
>> Rob Walker: I mean, I don't know. To me, a lot of that stuff -- there's a big -- I think
that there's a big problem in evaluating this stuff that people get really caught up in media
issues. And I am much more of a culture-focused person. Word of mouth existed long
before the Internet and word of mouth was powerful long before the Internet. And really
if you look at what changed in recent years, it isn't that consumers talked amongst
themselves and shared information and trusted each other more than they trusted
advertising. I think that that's always been true. I think that what's changed in recent
years is the degree to which marketers have figured out that -- have figured that out and
figured out how to harness it and tap into it for their own benefit.
That PBR story is an example of that, where while it was partly organic word of mouth, it
was also sort of juiced word of mouth in the sense that it was the word of mouth that was
being spread wasn't, hey, PBR is an awesome beer; it was, hey, PBR is giving us a
thousand dollars, which is kind of a different thing. And it's basically the insight has
been that if consumers trust their friends, let's turn their friends into media. And that I
think is a much bigger -- and I think that that has played out on the Internet, I think it's
played out in real life, and I assume it will -- I don't know that much about what will
happen with digital, but I assume that -- and, you know, what is consumer power and
like -- partly what I'm trying to argue in this book is that I'm not impressed by the
argument that consumer power is that we can e-mail our friends and tell them what to buy
or that we can complain on a blog and get a free product or whatever. I don't really think
that's real consumer power. Consumer power is, like, well, what is it that you want
companies to do? Do you want companies to behave in a more responsible way? If you
look at consumer movements of the past that resulted in things like product, like,
labeling, you know, or seat belts in cars, those are big manifestations of consumer power.
The ability to keep clicking 300,000 times a day and every single thing you look at is
sponsored by another company, I'm skeptical of that as power in a consumer way. I don't
mean to -- does that -- but that's probably the best I can do on the answer to that. Yes, sir.
>>: I just want to return to your examples of Timberland and PBR, which I think are both
interesting because they reflect reactionary spending control to unexpected consumer
behavior in totally different ways but with that common thread. And what I'm looking
for your insight on is what happens with the next level of reactionary marketing? Like
now, for example, where I see Colt 45 winding up like a PBR, but they're sort of the late
to the party. What do you think about that next stage marketing that happens when
there's an unexpected reaction and the insight and how will consumers and markers react
to that.
My second thing for you is just when you mention the crafting movement, that's really
interesting to me because it's relatively emergent quality, and I see like MAKE Magazine
and Etsy and this whole emergent plateau that's happening. Have you seen any
ergonomic marketing efforts that have gotten in there early and really targeted that and
understood it and reflected it?
>> Rob Walker: Well, I'm going to combine the two things. Because in some ways -- I
mean, I think that -- I've been asked about this a lot about -- and I know that companies
are looking at that movement and trying to figure out what to make of it and trying to
figure out -- to be blunt, they're trying to figure out how to cash in on it. And to some
extent there has been some limited movement to essentially sponsor, to do what -- sort of
something like what PBR did with -- and to do -- Scion and Red Bull have both been
involved as sponsors of crafting events.
>>: (Inaudible.)
>> Rob Walker: Yeah, I don't know if Mountain Dew has or not. I would have to take
your word on that.
And so they're trying to sort of align themselves with the culture. And this is kind of a
paradigm that a lot of big brands are using is that we'll support -- we'll support your
efforts. And what the brand gets out of it is kind of a -- like a positive association with
this -- it's like, well -- but, you know, I've talked to a lot of crafters about it and the
feelings are very mixed. There are some people who feel like an automobile company
has absolutely no business being in that subculture in any way. Some people feel that if
the automobile companies' checks clear, fine. So it kind of varies.
So -- and I wanted to mention that with that Colt 45 thing, they're actually owned by the
Pabst Brewing Company, Colt 45 is. So they're essentially trying to just recreate some
version of that. But so far as I know, there isn't any organic -- I don't -- I don't -- I'm not
aware of there being any organic, new interest in Colt 45. I think that they're attempting
to create some new interest around Colt 45. And I'm not sure if that's -- any Colt 45
drinkers here? You are? All right. Good for you.
Other -- let me get you. Yes.
>>: Your quote from 1939, which obviously you are familiar with the -- interpret it with
something written this past year made me think isn't it just a continuous history of a kind
of arms race between marketers and consumers, and marketers obviously want to
manipulate consumer behavior and consumers historically have resented being
manipulated. So marketers figured out some new way to manipulate consumer behavior
and it takes a lot for consumers to catch on to it, and there's backlash against it, the
marketers have to come up with something else. So this idea of sponsoring events would
not be overt advertising is kind of the latest thing.
But another kind of newish, or at least greatly expanded trend that I've noticed recently
that I think is a kind of attempt to manipulate without consumers being aware of it is the
explosion in product placement in TV and movies. And my favorite example of this is
Apple where from about 2000 to 2005 television literally was the alternative universe in
the ->> Rob Walker: Yeah, sure. Everyone on television using that.
>>: -- where Macintosh had 95 percent market share and Windows had 5 percent. And I
get the sense in the last couple of years that the pendulum has started to swing back. I see
a lot more Dells in TV shows.
>> Rob Walker: Well, and here's what I don't know and maybe you do. I don't know
how much of that was actually paid product placement. My hunch is, if you want to hear
something that Microsoft employees don't really want to hear, is that a lot of those
characters in those TV shows were being portrayed as cool and admirable in some ways,
and cool and admirable people are surrounded by the appropriate symbols that express
that, and that would be the Apple computer as opposed to a Dell.
>>: Maybe.
>> Rob Walker: I mean, I think that that -- I would not be surprised if that decision was
made much more by -- it's very murky, again, like -- but there are situations where things
are paid for and it's clear that it's -- doesn't really -- like that doesn't make any sense, why
would that person be doing that. And there are other situations where Hollywood
creators are aware as anybody else that, you know -- that this character would use this
kind of -- would, whatever, drink this kind of beer.
>>: It was everybody. It was, you know, police detectives were using an Apple
computer.
>> Rob Walker: Yeah, that's kind of weird. No, it's true, though, and there's been much
more product placement and it's much more -- and there are whole -- I talk in the book
about Axe, the deodorant brand, which actually had a whole show called Game Killers
that started as -- came right out of the creative brief for Axe that a game killer was
something that was the type of person that was relevant to one of their ad ideas, and they
said this is such a cool idea, let's just take it to MTV and make it a whole show. And
MTV said great. So when you TiVo past that, you TiVo past the entire show.
>>: Do you think there will be a backlash against product placement? It's gotten so
blatant.
>> Rob Walker: I don't know. People always -- people always complain about it and it
continues to work. And no one -- actually someone e-mailed me something today about
the FTC having -- I mean, if it's going to happen, I don't think it's going to -- people aren't
going to march in the streets about it. But it's possible that at some point -- and I know
that in Britain there are much more strict laws and thoughts at least pursued of these
issues. But I don't know. People have been predicting a backlash against this stuff for a
long time.
>>: Part of the FCC right now is they're proposing regulations on product placement
(inaudible).
>> Rob Walker: The FCC, okay. Yes, sir.
>>: I will point out that the (inaudible) overload of Macintosh, explains this stuff about
any product placement or payment.
>> Rob Walker: That could be, yeah. Could be. Could be. I just don't -- in the case of
the -- just I don't know the specifics of the Apple thing. Well, I'd have to defer. You get
to go.
>> Kim Ricketts: I have three questions.
>> Rob Walker: Three?
>>Kim Ricketts: How do you feel about the John Hodgman-created Apple/Mac
commercials?
>> Rob Walker: Well, in terms of are they entertaining or are they effective?
>>Kim Ricketts: Yeah, just kind of your thoughts about them.
>> Rob Walker: Personally as a consumer I'm tired of seeing them. There are too many.
As a business journalist, I understand why they keep running them, because it's clear that
they work. People talk about them all the time. And they've become part of -- part of
popular culture. I mean, he's -- Hodgman is almost more -- he's more famous for that
than his outstanding writing and his hilarious ->>Kim Ricketts: Actually, I was thinking about inviting Hodgman to Microsoft. What
do you think?
(Collective yes.)
>>Kim Ricketts: The next question I have is what about authenticity? I mean, you walk
into Whole Foods and, you know, they don't sell bleach because it's poison but they have
to fly in strawberries from Brazil. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes it seems to me
that their message doesn't jibe with the reality of what people are doing really. and I just
wondered about at what point do people -- does it tip and people don't shop there? I
mean, you know ->> Rob Walker: Yeah. In discussing -- authenticity is a word that gets terribly abused
unfortunately because what does it really -- I mean, people don't tend to define it. And
when I talk about it in the book -- I mean, and everyone wants to have an authentic,
like -- I mean, it's obvious you don't want to have a phony brand, although I actually sort
of think it would be interesting for someone to do that. I was talking to somebody about
this Seattle's Best Coffee, which I guess is just a division of Starbucks or something, and
I feel like they should actually just go with that and make that the centerpiece of their
branding. It would be something different. But I'm sure it'll be all about their heritage
and all that kind of stuff.
So, I mean, the thing is in the book I talk about so what is authentic. And in the book I
talk about Ecko, the Ecko rhino, which is associate -- like sort of came out of hip hop and
is now -- you see all kinds of people wearing the Ecko rhino now. It's really sort of
crossed over and become an acceptable brand for all kinds of people. But it's authentic,
quote/unquote, roots are sort of in hip hop culture. Well, what does that mean, like
what's the sort of empirical reality behind that. And, you know, the guy who created that
brand is -- he's a suburban New Jersey white kid who, you know, learned about graffiti
from a coffee table book. Is his brand authentic or not? I mean, you could make one
argument saying, well, it's not authentic because he's not really -- doesn't have any really
real roots in -- he didn't come from the streets and all that. I would argue that authenticity
is decided on in this dialogue. And if it -- I mean, authenticity happens in the
marketplace and if the marketplace judges it to be authentic, then it is. So to go circle
that around to Whole Foods, I think that Whole Foods actually makes more effort than
most companies to have a point of view to say that -- I know that they have rules about
we won't -- that there are things we -- and there are things that they could sell that they
won't sell because it doesn't meet their standards.
When you get down to the level of, you know, things being flown in, I don't know.
They're not saying -- it's not called Local Foods; it's called Whole Foods. So it's hard to
say. And to some extent I tend to want to push back on the consumer and say, look, if
that's an issue that's important, you know, or like if these are the issues that are important
to you, you can resolve some of those issues by shopping at Whole Foods but maybe
there are others that you're going to have to take on the responsibility yourself in some
other way. Not you personally, but...
>>Kim Ricketts: Like (inaudible) there's a bunch of work coming up lately and a lot
coming up this fall on using MRIs to study the way (inaudible).
>> Rob Walker: Yeah.
>> Kim Ricketts: And it doesn't seem like -- it seems like you're talking more not a
measurable brain (inaudible).
>> Rob Walker: Well, most of what's come out so far is essentially research that doesn't
do much -- in my view, it doesn't do much more than confirm psychology that's been kind
of documented in other ways but now it's confirmed with brain scans. It makes the media
very excited because they can write these stories about a buy button in the brain and all
this kind of stuff. We're a long way from knowing what it means that neurons are firing.
All we know when we see -- in my opinion, from what I've been able to read, basically
what we know when we see a picture of neurons firing in a part of the brain associated
with individuality, is we know that neurons fire in a part of the brain that are associated
with individuality. We don't really know what that means or how to make it happen and
all that kind of stuff. People are really interested in it, though, and spending a lot of
money to figure out everything they can. But I think we're a ways away from having any
real breakthroughs on that that I'm aware of. Somebody here might know more about it
than I do. Yes, you.
>>: Is it important for companies to create or have communities throughout their brands?
>> Rob Walker: I mean, it's certainly a good thing to have happen. And that's another
one that's tough. It sort of seems surprising that people would want to form communities
around brands. It seems like a weird thing to do. If we all hate marketing so much, why
would there be an iPod community or whatever.
You know, it's clearly something that every company wants to have happen. And I'm not
aware of any company discouraging it from happening. But often the efforts to try to
force it to happen are a little suspect and probably counterproductive. And if they -- all
they do is underscore the complete lack of enthusiasm about the brand.
There was a thing where -- I think it was Vespa was trying to do. They had this -- there's
this really famous guy who's like an expert on blogging or whatever and he -- and
business blogging. And he had created some -- he had sort of overseen the creation of
like hiring these Vespa bloggers, and it just sort of went nowhere and those sites actually
expired. It was just really embarrassing because it just made Vespa look sort of -- in my
opinion sort of clownish because they had sort tried to do this thing and it just didn't
happen. And part of it I think was they made a mistake. As an outsider, I'm not a scooter
guy, but I think that there were already all these existing community sites around
scooters. Not any specific brand, just scooters and, like, the community of people who
did that. And Vespa was trying to peel off part of it and say, no, just talk about our
scooters. And it just clanked. You know, so people are certainly trying all kinds of stuff
like that, though.
All right. Let's see. Let's go over here.
>>: I was a little bit unclear on what you meant by talking about American Apparel as an
example of the potential for consumer power. Because it seemed to me as though the
story might be that there's a small minority of people who do care about the so-called
ethical practices and they have shopped at American Apparel since the beginning. But
when the image switched to a more sex-based rather than ethics-based one, that brought
in the majority -- that brought in the rest of the people who are much more ->> Rob Walker: Well, I may have confused that in saying I don't -- I didn't mean to say
American Apparel as an -- I was trying to transition there -- American Apparel is one of
the -- there's -- I'm trying to speak to consumers about how they can exercise what's, you
know, their choices in ways that affect what's really important to them. To the extent to
which I have something to say to businesses, I point to American Apparel as an
interesting business to look at. I'm not talking to consumers there. And what I think is
interesting to me to business about American Apparel is that while everyone focuses on
the marketing, there's something compelling about the fact that their business practices
are so different from everyone else in their industry. Does that make more sense?
>>: I see. Yes.
>> Rob Walker: Okay.
>>: But it raises ->> Rob Walker: I must have run those together. Sorry about that. Yes?
>>: I made a transition in my career from a cultural scholar to now marketer. And so I
was sort of listening ->> Rob Walker: Pays better, right?
(Laughter.)
>>: Two sides of the same coin in some ways, but in different ways very different, right?
So I was listening to what you're saying kind of from two different perspectives, and one
is this makes sense and it's right thinking about this in terms of culture and not just in
terms -- a lot of the business terms that we're used to thinking about it. And in the other
sense of the -- you know, it's clearly not your job as a recorder to do this, but I'm trying to
think about, okay, what's my take away that's going to make me a better marketer. And
from the purely, like -- I'm on this path to how I'm here to sell things to people, how do I
leverage what you're trying to say to help me be a better marketer.
>> Rob Walker: You're absolutely right: that's not my agenda.
>>: I know it's not. But I'm wondering if you get this ->> Rob Walker: It's your job. It's your job to take away from this whatever you want to
take out of it. You know what I mean?
>>: What message would you give to somebody who's trying to pull something out that
says what can I take from this that helps me take these insights and not necessarily just
expend my product and sell more, but understand the nature of what I'm doing better so
that I can do it better as a craft.
>> Rob Walker: I'm always -- I'm a bad person to ask that. A lot of my readers are in the
marketing business. A lot of them. I don't know exactly what they're getting out of it. I
assume that what they get out of it is that I'm a knowledgeable observer who's not in the
business. And I assume that what they get out of it on some level is very specifically that
I'm not going to come up with, all right, here's the five-point plan, it works every time.
Because there's a lot of guys out there with a five-point plan that works every time, and
let me tell you a secret: it doesn't work. So you can listen to them if you want, but
they're trying to sell you their Kool-Aid. I don't have any Kool-Aid for you, you know. I
have my point of view on what I think is happening and what I think matters in the
culture.
What I said just now about American Apparel is like the reason that I sort of -- I
emphasize over and over that I wish that more -- I wish that I would get more questions
from people saying how can our business be changed in a way that would make it better,
you know. But I don't. I get a lot of questions about how can we convince people that
there's a community of fans around. Well, I don't know. Is there a community of fans
around your product? It's hard to say. And, you know, it really goes to what I'm talking
about like with this moment that we're in, I was saying earlier, with there's a lot of
awareness that consumers are kind of concerned about the earth, for lack of a better word,
and so much of the reaction has been to flood the marketplace with new symbols of virtue
attached to every product. Fiji Water is now marketed as "Every Drop is Green." It's Fiji
Water. It comes from Fiji. It's brought halfway around the world. Every drop is now
green because of reforestation efforts that they have undertaken that have offset their
carbon emissions.
If you walk away from that thinking that the best thing you can do to save the planet is
buy a bottle of Fiji Water, I don't know how helpful that is to the overall dialogue.
On the very specific subject of marketing when I'm asked sort of what makes a good ad,
over and over I just say honesty. Just be honest. Be honest about being an ad and be
honest in what you say. If there were more of that, I think that it would make the world a
better place. I know that wasn't useful, but that's the best I can do. Okay. Go ahead.
>>: I'm just curious about sort of you are what you eat. What is your media diet? Where
do you get your information and how do you translate it into what you do?
>> Rob Walker: I get everything from this one blog -- no, I'm just kidding. I look at all
kinds of stuff. I look at -- someone at like the -- I feed read, Bloglines reader, 210, it
changes all the time, 210 things there. But that's like not really -- like that's a good way
to spot patterns and things like that. Most of my ideas tend to come from a combination
of, you know, I read The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and most of the
business publications. And I talk to people. And most of the ideas come from talking to
people and finding what people are talking about and what they have something
interesting to say about. And sometimes that cross-checks with like, oh, yeah, I just saw
something on a blog about that. That's weird, that's interesting. Or didn't the Journal just
say the opposite? And I will say also that I do -- I read a lot of things that I -- I read a lot
of people -- I read a lot of not just blogs but sources that I don't like. And I read them
specifically because I don't agree with the way they view commercial culture. But I'm
trying to find a different point of view. So there is no easy answer to that and there is
no -- in terms of what I write about in the column, there's another factor which is
basically do I have something to say about this that I think my reader will be interested
in. Because I have ideas about who my reader is, and that's who I'm working for at the
end of the day. So I'm not trying to -- there's not like a rigid formula beyond that. It's
just kind of my gut about what do I think I can come up with to say about that, and my
reader will say, honey, did you know. It's a honey -- it's the "honey, did you know"
moment is what you're getting as they're sitting at breakfast and, did you know? So that's
what we're trying for.
All right. Now, is this a real question.
>>: It's a real question.
>> Rob Walker: Okay. Because we didn't rehearse anything beyond that one.
>>: In terms of conversations that sort of fill out your idea base, how has having and
starting your own marketing blog fit into that and what kinds of interactions do you get
out of that that you would be less likely to get in just serendipitous interaction?
>> Rob Walker: Yeah, that's been a good experiment that's been going on for a couple
years and has paid off a few times. I'll use the site sometimes, the murketing site to -- I'll
float out just like, you know, anybody know anything about this. And sometimes I'll get
interesting responses and sometimes I won't, and that will -- both things help me.
Because if I don't -- if sort of no one reacts, then it's like, maybe I'll just walk away from
this one. And then every once in a while I have some people who have just given me -we were talking about Dusty Nation, the local -- that was a reader tip from someone who
contacted me through murketing and said this is a company I think you would like or that
you would be interested in. So, yeah, it's paid off a few times. Few times. Doesn't work
with everything. But there have been a few times when it's worked out really well. Yes,
sir.
>>: What's the most positive and most negative reaction you've gotten from some things
you've written?
>> Rob Walker: Huh. Well, I'm still waiting for positive reactions. Let's see. One of
the cons -- the truth is that the old advertising stuff I used to do would get for whatever
reason -- and this actually influenced me in a lot of ways. When I started writing an
advertising column for Slate, and I was shocked at the degree of vehemence that people
expressed in their opinions about whether an ad was good or bad and how stupid I was
for saying the wrong thing. That was kind of formative to me in sort of saying maybe I'm
onto something with this idea that there's an audience for this stuff who will take it
seriously.
The columns that tend to get the most reaction, pro or con, usually deal with some of
these kind of consumer ethics issues that I'm talking about, of Fiji Green -- like I wrote a
column about Fiji Green or fair trade coffee or stuff like that. Those seem to get the most
interest. I don't know, though, if that has more to do -- that might have more to do with
the consumers -- the readers who are engaged in those issues are more passionate and
therefore more likely to express an opinion. But it did give me the sense in just over the
time in writing the column that that was the general subject area, that consumer ethics
subject area that I needed to have the book close on and lead you up to basically. In the
back.
>>: Do you think it's possible for there to be a brand without necessarily providing a
product or service? And I'm kind of thinking about things like Paris Hilton.
>> Rob Walker: About what?
>>: Paris Hilton.
>> Rob Walker: Paris Hilton, yeah. Sure. And there's -- Paris Hilton is just the name -she has a licensing arrangement or did with one of the top licensing firms where they
were just -- it was just like here is the brand, Paris Hilton, and see what you can license
this onto. I don't know where that stands. Unfortunately that coincided with whatever
latest round of unpleasant stuff she was involved in. I don't know if that went anywhere.
Yeah. There are -- it's kind of come up a few times in the column and in real life of sort
of the brand without a product. There's a -- there's an artist here in Seattle named Shawn
Wolfe who did a very famous project called "Beat Kit," which was the brand without a
product. And posters all over and then created a lot of interest. And in a lot of ways
Shepard Fairey's "Obey Giant" project was for a long time a brand without a product, and
then he just went ahead and started marking products.
So and then I've written in the column about -- well, I wrote in the column -- I know my
confederate here through Brondo, which was a fictional drink that existed only in a
movie, in Idiocracy, the Mike Judge movie, that someone brought -- decided needed to
exist in the world. So apparently we're open enough to brands that even -- there aren't
enough of them around, we have to bring them out of the movies and make them up out
of thin air and embrace those.
>>Kim Ricketts: Maybe one more question.
>> Rob Walker: All right.
>>: Microsoft has a huge company obviously, has lots of products. We have Xbox,
competes with a bunch of different things; we have Windows, the competes; Live Search,
the competes. I guess as a brand, what are your thoughts of Microsoft itself as a brand?
Does it matter anymore? I guess I'd just like an outside opinion on that.
>> Rob Walker: Well, yeah, as you say, Microsoft is now sort of a collection of different
brands. Because I don't know that someone associates Xbox with Microsoft quite as
much as it probably -- as you might assume. I think Microsoft as a brand, you know, it
gets beat up on. It sort of serves a whipping boy function, it's sort of a fill in for a big,
scary corporation. But on the other hand, I think it's -- I would assume it's widely seen
as -- I mean, it's extremely pervasive and seen as a reliable, trustworthy thing. That
would be my guess. I've never really reported on the reaction to the Microsoft brand.
I think that Microsoft has probably been wise to not really extend that brand and to -when they introduced a video game, call it the X -- or a video console really branded as
the Xbox and now with the Zune and whatever else you're working on, it's really like the
Microsoftness of that is kind of de-emphasized, whereas Apple has very forcefully
pushed itself Appleness onto everything that it's done. I mean, there's not a different logo
for the iPod. It's the Apple logo. And I believe there is a different logo for the Zune, for
the Xbox. So I think that's probably the right move. When you're as big as Microsoft, it
probably isn't -- you're as big and in the consumer world as Microsoft is, it's probably not
hugely helpful to keep pushing yourself into new -- and particularly when you have a
long history of antitrust battles and so on. It doesn't help. So that will be -- okay.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.
(Applause.)
>> Rob Walker: Hope you had fun. I did.