This week’s obscure book recommendation: Buying In - What We Buy and Who We Are.

In researching the Ten Principles book I must have read this one four or five times, and in a way it set me off down an intellectual trajectory that I’m still on — trying to understand why we like what we like, value what we value, and buy what we buy.

This book (along with a handful of others) is the reason I concluded that the first principle behind creating a great customer experience is to reflect the customer’s identity.

From the back cover:

“Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Consumers are in control. Or so we’re told…this accepted wisdom misses a much more important cultural shift…Rather than becoming immune to brands we are rapidly embracing them…Walker demonstrates the ways in which buyers adopt products not just as consumer choices but as expressions of their identity.

(This book is) part marketing primer, part work of cultural anthropology…Walker unravels that tension between wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out, wanting to be unique, yet somehow attached to something greater than ourselves.”

To me this book is as relevant and thought-provoking today as it was when it hit the shelves ten years ago.

See this post on LinkedIn