The second-best column in the New York Times Magazine, next to The Ethicist, is Consumed. Written by Rob Walker, who claims to have created the term "murketing," and noted by the "$ / ¢" stamp, Consumed explains in just a few hundred words each week why we spend the way we do. (This week he told you why you buy a certain snack, because you believe it to be healthy, when it isn't really.) Walker's out with a new book, Buying In — that we'll file in on our Consumer Trend Books That Are Actually Interesting shelf next to titles like Maxed Out — which is like pages and pages of his excellent magazine column rolled into things called chapters and billed with the buzzworthy promise to take on a tour of the "consumer-persuasion industry." Who knew it'd be such a suspense-thriller?

In "Buying In," Rob Walker explores such data about humans under the influence of branding. He tells that, while writing the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine, he heard from various trend watchers that the Internet age had brought forth a new species of consumer: the Homo Economicus. This supremely rational human being – more and more isolated from mainstream media, shielded by ad-blocking gizmos and armed with easy-to-find knowledge – was said to navigate skeptically through the jingles and fibs and bright packaging and to make sensible purchases on the basis of criteria like quality and utility. Traditional advertising, in other words, was finished.

Soon enough Mr. Walker discovered that such reports were exaggerated: The siren ad songs continued to be sung, and consumers remained all too ready to submit. This was brought home to him forcefully the day that Nike, the marketing leviathan, announced the purchase of Converse, its smaller rival. A longtime wearer of Converse's canvas sneakers, Mr. Walker realized to his horror that his badge of nonconformity was in fact an engineered, hugely profitable fad that Nike was eager to get in on. Somewhere along the way he had been seduced. He had drunk from the spiked juice of the Orange Grove.

When the one guy who's supposed to see through all the marketing come-ons can't remain immune, there is no hope for the rest of us.

So run, you American consumer, into the welcoming fields of Prada purses and Puma sneakers, where your credit cards are not just adornments for your wallet, but symbols of your allegiance. That Walker does not have a photo of himself doing this, on Buying In's book jacket, upsets us.

[WSJ]