Consumer Republic : Using Brands to Get What You Want, Make Corporations Behave, and Maybe Even Save the World

I have a dream. In this dream, I have purchased a toaster. I’m quite excited about this toaster. It wasn’t cheap, but then it is an Acme. Acme is a brand with real toaster cred. My new appliance is lovely to look at, built like a bank vault, and it apparently does a stellar job of browning bagels, which are my favourite breakfast food. I know this, because I have done my homework. Most of the people who have purchased the same brand of toaster are very pleased with this feature, and they’ve said so on the Google-powered brand-rating website that I always consult about such things. Let’s call it consumerrepublic.com. I trust it because so many people contribute ratings to its brand trust indices, and because Google cleverly assigns authority to each rater and weights his or her opinions using one of its brilliant algorithm thingies. Thus, if this Internet resource tells me that Acme is a brilliant maker of toasters and that their products will reflect their owners’ good taste and judgment, I’m inclined to believe it.
 
Except that mine is broken. Right out of the box. I’m a bit sad about this, because I’m not one to go out and buy a new toaster every five minutes. Or a new anything, for that matter. I, along with the rest of the world in my dream, prefer to buy things only when I need them, or when I’m genuinely inspired by them. I generally pay for them in cash, so that these things are really mine, rather than things I’m pretending are mine. That makes shopping for something like a toaster a bit of an event, and much more fun. It also means that I expect a lot when I plunk down my hard-earned money. When I bring a new purchase home to my modest, paid-for, tasteful residence, furnished only with objects that are useful and/or inspiring, I look forward to the unveiling. In this case, however, that shining moment, and the beginning of many years of mornings made sunnier by bagel perfection, must be postponed.  
 
With a mildly exasperated sigh, I sit down at my computer. First, I go back to consumerrepublic.com, the brand-rating website that steered me to Acme, sign on, and add my purchase to the “pending resolution” file. On this imaginary website, every brand has one. It allows people in my situation to let the world know that there is a problem but that the jury is still out as to how that brand will deal with it. The site aggregates these complaints, and lists the information alongside its brand trust ratings. Brand marketers pay close attention to this leading indicator the way they used to watch the Dow, because this site doesn’t just score brands for trust and performance – it also trends that score. When I looked at Acme’s ratings while shopping for my dream toaster, I could see not only that they were pretty high but also that they had been gently trending higher for a long time. This company seemed not only to be good; it seemed to be getting better. Acme won’t want to risk reversing that trend. Indeed, somewhere at Acme Global Headquarters, the potentially negative experience I’m having has already RSSed its way to a real-time customer satisfaction database. It may even have made a little bong noise when it got there. That would be cool. Regardless, Acme is already paying attention. Brand trust is too hard and expensive to earn to risk it on one broken toaster.
 
My next task is to contact Acme directly, which I do through their corporate website. Their site notices that I’ve come from consumerrepublic.com, so it jumps me up in the queue for a response. It doesn’t take long, then, before Acme offers me two options on the spot. I can return the toaster for a replacement, or I can have it repaired. Being a guy who hates to see anything go to waste, I pick the second. In my dream, you can get things fixed. People are making their things last longer, and repair shops have made a big comeback. Noting my IP address, Acme geolocates me and is able to recommend a shop a few minutes away. The whole process so far has taken under ten minutes. I pack the toaster back into its reusable box and head for Main Street.
 
By the time I get to the shop, Acme has already sent an electronic docket to the repairperson. In this dream, he’s a cranky but basically kind older fellow, a bit like Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street. The problem turns out to be simple to resolve. Mr. Hooper notices a screw that’s loose and binding the mechanism. He fixes it on the spot, makes some trenchant remarks about the weather, and I’m on my way. Mr. Hooper closes the electronic docket, alerting Acme that the technical issue, at least, has been resolved. Acme, however, is not breathing easy just yet. In my dream world, their brand isn’t off the hook until I say it is.
 
So, just to make them sweat, I take my time walking home. I wave as I pass all the other modest, tasteful, paid-for residences in my neighbourhood, stopping to talk to my next-door neighbour, who is enjoying the sunny morning by waxing his immaculately maintained ten-year-old car. It looks and runs like new, and people in the neighbourhood admire him for this. Finally home, I place the toaster on the kitchen counter and pop in a bagel. Moments later, golden brown perfection. Flushed with carbohydrate-induced bliss and feeling benevolent, I jump back on the web and remove my “pending resolution” flag at consumerrepublic.com. For good measure, I even head over to YouTube and tag Acme’s latest commercial as “basically true” or “essentially credible.” Something like that. A great rating from me on consumerrepublic.com will have to wait, though. It takes more than one perfect bagel to win me over.
 
So that’s my dream. A world in which we live a little more simply, we buy things that are better rather than cheaper and more numerous, and we make them last. Where brands survive on selling better, fewer products, and fear letting us down more than they ever fear a decline in their stock price. And where the bagels are delicious.
 
That would really be cool.
 
I started work on Consumer Republic at what I hope will turn out to have been the lowest point in the history of consumerism. As I write, the civilized world is struggling to emerge from an economic near-disaster. This calamity’s very roots, they tell us, lie in consumer debt and Wall Street’s cynical exploitation of it. And this calamity has only momentarily distracted our attention from an even bigger mess, a planet in unprecedented distress from being plundered to meet the insatiable demands of its human inhabitants. More and more of us need and want more things, so we’re ravaging the place like raccoons at a dumpster. More and more of us have been unwilling to wait until we can afford all that stuff, so we’ve mortgaged our futures like Wimpy hitting up Popeye for hamburger money. On CNN, serious-looking people in suits offer a glum play-by-play of the nasty comeuppance in financial markets, while a few channels up the dial at National Geographic, freaked-out-looking people in khaki shorts, predict the same for our environment. It’s all a bit scary and, although nobody is putting it in exactly these words, it seems clear to me that the fundamental problem is too many people being sold too much stuff. Marketing, therefore, might essentially be at the bottom of all this.
 
It didn’t take everybody else long to arrive at the same conclusion. A Harris Interactive poll from the spring of 2009, when things seemed economically at their worst, showed that two thirds of Americans had already decided Madison Avenue was at least part of the problem. Half of those polled believed that most of the blame could be sent to that address.
 
It was a natural enough reaction. Marketing is an easy, logical scapegoat, if the problem is too much consumption. But, to me, this doesn’t quite add up.
 
Most people understand that marketing has something to do with profitably meeting the demands of a group of people for a particular product or service. A marketer’s job is to find a socalled “need,” and then find a way to meet it and make some money in the process. To a marketer, consumer demand is assumed. It’s like a natural resource to be exploited. It’s just out there, like air. The marketer simply has to know how to recognize it, and then cater to it. However, if you think about it, there is a big, fat, and possibly baseless assumption behind that definition: that every sale of a product or service is self-validating. In other words, a marketer’s responsibility ends when the money changes hands. If you bought it, it’s because you needed it.
 
Yet if it’s as simple as that, how can we explain this orgy of debt-fuelled consumption in the last decade or so? Surely these “needs” of ours haven’t increased over time, have they? On the contrary, for a lot of us in the so-called developed world, they’ve diminished quite a bit. A couple of centuries ago, I could have presented a persuasive list of “needs” to anyone who cared to cater to them, from nutrition and personal hygiene to transportation and telecommunication. But now? I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of running out of really pressing problems that could be solved with a trip to the mall. When fortunes can be made by combining tooth-whitening agents with mouthwash, or by devising a way for your car to recognize your mobile phone so that you can have conversations through the stereo, marketers have got to be scraping the bottom of the needs barrel.
 
To me, this is a paradox. If marketing is about needs, and we need less today than we ever have, why is there more marketing? More perplexing still, why does it seem to be working? Working so well, in fact, that it risks destroying our way of life? ...