Branding more powerful than ever: book

Rob Walker knows everything about our relationship with brands and advertising and why we (almost) always fall for it. Or at least, the blogger and New York Times columnist tries to dig deeper into the subject in his new book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. The book analyzes branding in its traditional and newest forms, acting as a little brother to No Logo.

Walker created the term “murkering” to define a new genre of subtle and disguised marketing and “the blurring of the line between art and commerce.”

A Globe and Mail article about the book mentions a recent ad campaign for Vespa in the streets of Montreal made by the agency Dentsu, which consisted of life-size black-and-white posters representing hipsters whose heads had been replaced by the front of the iconic scooter (the campaign was also launched in Toronto.) The posters were directly pasted on the walls of buildings, without any other indication of what the ad was for except for the Scooter head.

Read on another review of the book in Time magazine.