The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

I’m re-reading Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ for the third (fourth?) time, and it’s obvious to me that brands will never again trigger off the blind trust they used to, however hard we try as marketers.

All that we can do as marketers is to accept that we are all cynical post-Nader shoppers, and then work around that reality, like Paco Underhill does, on page 166 of ‘Why We Buy’ —

Another reason touch and trial have become so important is the waning power of product brand name. When consumers believed in the companies behind the big brands, their belief went a long way towards selling things. Now, we are all individualists.

For that matter, we are all post-Nader shoppers — we’ll believe it when we see/ smell/ touch/ hear/ taste/ try it. Depending on what we’re buying and what it costs, there’s a healthy skepticism (or is it a nagging doubt) in our heads that must be put to rest before we can buy at ease. We need to feel a certain level of confidence in a product and its value, which comes only through hard evidence, not from TV commercials or word-of-mouth.

I often wonder if my (not yet born) children will approve of me, forgive my own less than perfect relationship with my parents, indulge my quirky ban on mass media, and find something in me to love and look up to. As I read page 141-142 of Paco Underhill’s ‘Why We Buy‘, I realized that, while my children may forgive my many faults, they’ll probably not forgive me for trying to ban Tom & Jerry from the living room –

Today both parents are almost certainly working at jobs, which means buying that cannot be done over lunch hours must take place during times the family might happily spend together. Shopping then becomes an acceptable leisure outing — less pleasurable, perhaps, than a week at Disney World, but not entirely without potential for fun. Also, divorce is common enough that the single parent (either one) in the company of the brood is a common sight in movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Kids go everywhere because we take them, but once there, they alter the shopping landscape in obvious and subtle ways.

Inspired by Paco Underhill, and with half an hour to spare, I stepped into the Atria Mall at Worli to do a little retail anthropology of my own.

I saw a few hundred families on their Sunday afternoon outing, I saw empty shops and a full food court, and then I saw the perfect off white linen jacket from Provogue.

I have been searching for an off-white linen jacket for months, I totally love the brand (more than half of my shirts are from Provogue), and, on any other day, I would have whipped out my wallet and paid the four and a half thousand bucks without even thinking about it.

However, even the most perfect linen jacket is so obviously not a necessity, especially when I already have half a dozen jackets I wear no more than ten times in a year.

So, I lingered on for half a minute and let my fingers roam over the soft textured fabric, then reined in my temptation, and walked out of the mall, thinking of the lime-green shoes from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ —

Economist Eric Beinhocker describes the real difference between the New Yorker and Yanamamo tribes on page 8-9 of his brilliant book ‘The Origin of Wealth’ —

Consider two tribes. First we have the Yanamamo, a stone tool-making hunter-gatherer tribe living along the Orinoco River on the remote border of Brazil and Venezuela. Second, we have the New Yorkers, a cell-phone-talking, cafe-latte-drinking tribe living along the Hudson River on the border of New York and New Jersey. Both tribes share the same thirty thousand or so genes that all humans do and thus, in terms of biology and innate intelligence, are essentially identical. Yet, the lifestyle of the New Yorkers is vastly different from the well-preserved hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Yanamamo, who have yet to invent the wheel, have no writing, and have a numbering system that does not go beyond one, two, and many.

The average income of a Yanamamo tribesperson is approximately $90 per person per year (this, naturally, is an estimate as they do not use money), while the average income of a New Yorker in 2001 was around $36,000 or 400 times that of the Yanamamo. Without any moral judgment on who is happier, morally superior, or more in tune with their environment, there is clearly a wide gap in material wealth between the two tribes.