Why consumers want the brands they buy.

There's an old joke about a mafioso who, under cross-examination at his income-tax-evasion trial, is questioned about how he's managed to realize a seven-figure income from his very modest, on-the-books business—which is a hot-dog cart. The don straightens his silk tie and replies, "I got a good location."

With apologizes to Oscar Mayer, the true relevance that this anecdote has for a branding audience actually has little to do with wieners. It is, rather, a decent lesson in mass-market differentiation. One can safely assume that the hot dog one buys from most any cart in the same city will be, more or less, the same hot dog. This means that what distinguishes the highly successful vendor from his near-identical competitor is more often found in the murky realm of what has nothing much to do with hot dogs: where you buy one, the color of umbrella under which it's sold or the name assigned to the dog in question.

When all products in a category are fundamentally the same, the creation of a difference in the consumer's mind is the marketer's art. And today, that art is pure alchemy. No longer able to base pitches on such boring, old-line factors as quality and value, marketers must increasingly reach for the magic and metaphorical to create a desire for a brand that, in most meaningful ways, looks one hell of a lot like its competitors on the adjacent rack or shelf.

In his just-released book, Buying In, author Rob Walker explores the contemporary genesis of this desire, which is part of what the The New York Times Magazine columnist describes as "the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are, and how it is changing." That marketing is changing is, of course, not exactly news to those who ply the craft. Yet even many of them, toiling amid the vagaries of the 21st century marketplace, have no doubt paused to consider what Walker considers in his pages: specifically, how it is that marketing has so quickly abandoned the mass-market ad and entered a realm in which, as Walker says, "marketers . . . blur the line between branding channels and everyday life" and consumer participation has leapfrogged the pitch. Walker has even coined a term for this new order of the branding biz: murketing.

In the excerpt to follow, Walker initiates the process of breaking what he calls the "desire code" that governs why people choose some brands over others. To do this, he takes the reader to Magic, the gargantuan apparel show held annually in Las Vegas. There, where even a thousand different T-shirts can devolve into a dismal sameness, a label alone creates meaning, substance and validity—but a few of the ethereal elements that drive purchase. A murky world, indeed. —Robert Klara

Chapter One: THE PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM

Rational Thinking Imagine that you're naked.

Or maybe it's better to put it this way: Imagine that you need some sort of clothing. This may not be a biological imperative like thirst, but wearing something is still pretty much a baseline acceptable social behavior. How, then, do you choose to meet this authentic consumer need?

Cram as many responses to that question as will fit into the two million square feet of exhibition space at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and you have Magic. Magic is a twice yearly trade show for the apparel industry, a place where makers of clothes gather to display their wares for the benefit of retail buyers—the people who decide what boutiques and department stores all over the world will make available to consumers. Most every brand that you could think of is here (from Polo to True Religion Jeans, from Jhane Barnes to Timberland), along with many brands you probably could not think of.

The geography of Magic is the geography of consumer demographics: Sections are labeled Young Men's, Magic Kids, Active Lifestyle, Casual Lifestyle, Women's Sportswear, Dresses and Outerwear, and Streetwear. The mode of Magic is mercenary tribalism: buyers and sellers roaming the floor in their signifying outfits (there's a couture guy, here's a hip-hop girl, there goes a Japanese hipster kid), cutting their deals, while the trend prospectors and fashion editors study the action, looking for the smallest flicker of a pattern change in the garment zeitgeist. The language of Magic is an endless babel of logos and brands.

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If brands and logos are mere symbols, empty of meaning, then choosing among clothing lines—or anything—becomes a largely rational affair. There are probably four, or maybe four and a half, factors to consider. One, of course, is price. Another is convenience. A third is quality. The fourth rational factor, I think it's fair to say, is pleasure. The half factor is ethics, which I'll leave aside for now but return to later, in this book's final section.

Needless to say, these ideas not only collide, but bleed into one another: You can derive pleasure from the simple fact of a bargain's low price, for example. To borrow a term from economics, the goal of the rational consumer is to "maximize utility"—the usefulness, or satisfaction, a consumer derives from a given purchase. A vacuum cleaner that does a nice job on your carpets is both useful and satisfying (assuming you want your carpets clean); a vacuum cleaner that leaves the carpet looking just as filthy as it did before you bought the thing probably isn't.

It's a simple enough framework for decision making, one that marginalizes squishier ideas like brand image. It's also consistent with what 21st century consumers tell surveyors about how we make decisions: We regularly claim that logos mean little or nothing to us. Those polled by GfK Roper Consulting on the subject of why they buy what they buy named "past experience" with a given brand, followed by quality, price and "personal recommendations of others." Only about a fifth were willing to cite branding as a factor at all. Another survey, focused specifically on apparel, suggested that most consumers had wised up to all the hype about new styles and trends and that a majority agreed that "fashion is less important to me than value and comfort." Who could disagree? Of course you and I are more interested in rational concerns like "value and comfort" than on frivolous trends. "Buying a $5,000 handbag just because it's a status symbol is a sign of weakness," as one keen observer of branded culture put it. Who was that keen observer? Miuccia Prada, overseer of the famous luxury brand. (Presumably, buying a $5,000 Prada bag is okay, if you're doing it for the right reasons—quality and value, for instance.) This summarizes the thinking of those who point to the emerging superdemanding new consumer. Like Homo economicus—"Economic Man," the strictly rational cost/benefit maximizer of economic models—the new Consumer Economicus sorts through the explosion of available information and makes his or her best choice. Consumer Economicus is not swayed by branding, "status symbols," or anything else that smacks of phony image making.

Yet it's hard to square this with the endless choices on view at Magic. There must be a million products here, 10 million. Clearly there are differences in quality, materials, cut, form. But how many differences can there be? Shirts, pants, dresses, shoes. These are the essential tropes. Are there really so many quality and style variations?

The answer is in the Desire Code, my name for the complex of factors, rational and otherwise, that spark us to make particular purchase decisions. The backdrop for cracking that code—and the reason it's getting more complicated to crack—is the most interesting thing on display at Magic, a thing that absolutely nobody talked about, even though it was obvious everywhere you looked: the Pretty Good Problem.

FIFTY-THREE PRETTY GOOD KITCHEN RANGES A couple of years ago, Consumer Reports tested and ranked 53 different kitchen ranges, priced from $400 to $5,200. Of these, it found that 47 were, over all, "very good." Four were "excellent." The lowest composite rating, given to a $1,100 Frigidaire dual-fuel model and a $750 GE gas range, was "good." None were rated "poor" or even "fair."

Barry Schwartz is a psychology professor at Swarthmore College with a particular interest in the incredible (and at times paralyzing) abundance of options available to the contemporary consumer. He wrote a book about it, The Paradox of Choice. Once upon a time, the challenge for the consumer was navigating a world of faulty, shoddy or unsafe products. But really, Schwartz argues, that's not much of an issue anymore. The 53 pretty good kitchen ranges are a routine example of something that he sees happening in practically every consumer category. So when Consumer Reports, or whatever other authority is doing the testing, studies some group of products, the conclusion is invariably that most of the choices are, you know, pretty good. All that's left is to sift among increasingly minor differences to decide which one is the very best value of all, by however absurdly narrow a margin. And while we may feel otherwise sometimes, the simple fact is that there are probably more pretty good products being sold in America now than at any time in history. This is a tribute to progress, but it both complicates our decision-making as consumers and makes it increasingly difficult for one of those 53 ranges to stand out.

While Schwartz approaches this problem from the point of view of the befuddled and overwhelmed consumer, Seth Godin is among those who look at it from the marketer's perspective. Godin is the author of many marketing- and business-advice books, including one called Purple Cow. The title is explained in an anecdote about driving through France with his family; at first they were "enchanted" by the "storybook cows" they saw, but within 20 minutes, the sight of these animals had become familiar, and "boring." If a purple cow were to come into view, however—"that would be interesting," Godin wrote.

His point was that "most products are invisible," as is most marketing, and this means things must be made "remarkable" if they are to have a chance to succeed. There has to be something there for people to talk about. The first edition of Purple Cow, for example, included a limited number distributed in milk carton-like containers.

It's important to parse the metaphor closely: The cow is not remarkable because it produces more milk or requires less feed or also functions as an MP3 player and digital camera. Its purpleness is not an innovation, it's a novelty. The cow—or the kitchen appliance or the garment—still functions much like all its marketplace rivals. Except that it's purple. Which is "remarkable."

THE COMMODITY T The Pretty Good Problem is even more acute at Magic than it is in the pages of Consumer Reports or, possibly, the picturesque pastures of France. The more narrow the range of actual differences in commodity attributes, the more important it becomes to create a different kind of value—one that transcends the merely material. This is the goal of branding.

It's easy to think of branding as a transparent and almost pointless process: Huge companies buying TV ads to shout their trademarked names at us is pretty much the opposite of honest and authentic expression, let alone novelty. A mere logo, then, seems an unlikely way to achieve Godin's state of purpleness. But there is more to branding than that. Branding is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. A hundred years ago or more—when consumers started to choose (for instance) factory-sealed containers of flour marked Pillsbury, rather than buying flour of unknown provenance and quality out of open vats—that idea might have been strictly utilitarian and rational: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, and thanks in part to the sprawling abundance that production improvements offered, the ideas attached to products have by necessity become more elaborate and ambitious. This is why, for example, a widely discussed and award-winning campaign for Dove skin cleansers—featuring women who were decidedly less svelte than the models traditionally used in advertising images—took the form of a grandiose statement on the nature of beauty itself.

If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people—whether they admit it to pollsters or even fully understand it themselves—to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand. It solves the Pretty Good Problem.

Here is one tool for understanding how this plays out in the market: the T-shirt. The T-shirt, really, is nothing. A former undergarment popularized as outerwear by World War II veterans who enjoyed their "skivvy" shirts on the often balmy Pacific front, it is today the plain brown cow of clothing, the sartorial equivalent of tap water. On a functional level, T-shirt innovation has not been radical compared with, say, the evolution in music-listening products. A time traveler from the 1930s might not know how to operate an iPod but could still figure out how to use the 21st century T-shirt.

But speaking of music: Band logos stood out as one popular strategy for adding value to a commodity in my safari through the Magic wilderness. A dozen or more companies offered T-shirts for the Clash, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Afrika Bambaataa, Melle Mel and a seemingly endless variety of others, from the well-known to the obscure. At least three companies were selling rock T-shirts for toddlers—two had Ramones offerings. Maybe the bands who turned CBGB into the birthplace of American punk did not sell branded merch at the time, but 30 years later, Ramones T-shirts have outsold Ramones albums 10 to 1. And CB's itself had a sizable Magic booth; in fact, its clothing line grossed $2 million in 2004, double the revenue of the actual music club, which later shut down.

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Finally, there were T-shirts that simply advertised consumer products. Coastal Concepts had Burger King and Reese's Cup shirts. Logotel had shirts for Kellogg's, Hostess, M&M's. There were Moon Pie shirts. Others had Ford, Dodge and Chevy shirts. And if you are still imagining that you are thirsty, there were shirts for 7UP, Mountain Dew, RC, Dr Pepper, A&W root beer, Miller High Life, Corona, Guinness, Budweiser, even Hamm's and Mickey's. A company called Brew City offered up the "subversive" versions that assumed brand literacy in order to mock it, by way of emblems like Schitt, in the style of the Schlitz logo.

Eventually, I turned a corner and was confronted with the Che booth. Here, in a fairly large and lavish display, a company called Fashion Victim was peddling to interested retailers a huge array of shirts, banners, and other items featuring the iconic image of Che Guevara. It also offered Lenin shirts, Mao shirts, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Geronimo shirts. Fashion Victim's Web site explained: "Join the revolution with us here at Fashion Victim! These are revolutionary times, so where better to get the gear you need. We have all the latest designs in the world of propaganda and revolution, not to mention we are the only licensed retailers of Che Guevara shirts in the US of A."

Even this brief tour of the Magic trade show suggests that those four and a half rational factors aren't going to be quite enough to steer Consumer Economicus to a decision. We say we make choices based on factors like value and comfort—but what happens when we face a nearly infinite variety of things that are close to identical on a functional level? Perhaps, like Miuccia Prada, Consumer Economicus thinks that buying a "symbol" is a sign of "weakness." But in the real world of the Pretty Good Problem, symbols are more important than ever.

ECKO UNLTD'S CUL-DE-SAC CRED The knee-jerk bias against logos that consumers display when quizzed by pollsters should be no surprise. Even if we concede that, yes, some symbols and objects really are important to us after all, we remain suspicious that symbolic meaning can be invented—by, for example, professional branders and logo makers. Valuing an object just because it's a symbol—of status or anything else—sounds fake, contrived, phony. This is why most descriptions of the new consumer emphasize our demand for authenticity.

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent. Think of it as the difference between a trophy obtained by winning a race and an identical trophy obtained by forking over a few bucks at a pawnshop: One is clearly authentic in the way that the other is not.

So maybe the Apple brand connects with consumers because its products really are innovative and different, and Nike's brand is authentic because it can be tied directly to the company's roots as an enabler of athletic achievement. Any symbol that fails this basic authenticity test, according to this line of thought, will fail with the new Consumer Economicus.

But who really decides what's authentic and what isn't? Just across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center, in a temporary building that was the size of a house, I found an interesting case study in how complicated the answer to that question can be. The structure was emblazoned with the stark silhouette of a rhinoceros: the logo of apparel brand Ecko Unltd. The Ecko rhino, on T-shirts, baggy jeans and other garments, has become a widely recognized symbol, familiar in dozens of rap videos and on streets (and cul-de-sacs) all over America, and in 5,000 retail locations, from specialty shops to malls. Its most explosive growth has occurred in the years since the turn of the 21st century—right alongside the growing rhetoric about logoproof consumers.

American hip-hop culture, with its roots dating back to the gritty realities of the Bronx in the late 1970s, provides a particularly interesting backdrop for discussing authenticity. Clearly, hip-hop has long since gone mainstream, and as both a musical genre and a recognizable visual style is widely consumed outside of the tough urban environments where it first flourished. Even so, as anyone with passing familiarity with contemporary hip-hop knows, it's a culture that remains positively obsessed with authenticity—almost every top-selling rapper makes his or her own street cred (maybe a past dealing drugs, maybe direct experience with violence, maybe just an autobiography tied up in big-city poverty) a primary lyrical subject. In the early 2000s, as hip-hop evolved into an aesthetic available in suburban department stores under the rubric of "urban" apparel, connections to the authentic street remained important. Urban apparel redefined the young men's clothing business, and most of the successful brands had some direct link to hip-hop—Rocawear through Jay-Z and Damon Dash; Sean John through P. Diddy; Phat Fashions through Russell Simmons.

Ecko was as big as, or bigger than, any of the hip-hop-associated brands just mentioned. Many people would likely have recognized that rhino symbol on Ecko's freestanding building at Magic, but few would have been able to tell you much about the man behind it: a white, baby-faced 33-year-old from the Jersey suburbs. Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an "echo," which turned out to be Marc.) In about the fifth grade, he started to think about the relationship between style and social groups. He also figured out that not every place was as ethnically and culturally diverse as Lakewood's public schools: At extended family get-togethers, it was a source of amusement that young Marc was into this exotic thing called break dancing. Not that he could do it very well—"too fat," he told me. He couldn't rap, either; but he could draw.

He learned about graffiti culture through photography books by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. Visiting a cousin in Trenton, he told me, he would see "all the freight trains that I guess had run in New York, bombed with graffiti." Graffiti characters replaced comic books as his primary visual influence. He raked leaves to raise the money for a pair of Adidas shell toes, like Run-D.M.C. had. He learned about Polo through a reference in "La Di La Di," by Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick. Style was cultural expression, and customizing clothes was "a big part of the urban dialect," he explained, so he took up the airbrush. By his early teens, he was charging classmates to make designs on their jeans or shirts, in his parents' garage. "I was waitressing at a pizza shop, and I was counting my singles," Marci told me. "Marc was counting off twenties."

As a student at Rutgers in 1992, he dreamed up six designs and screen-printed them on T-shirts that he sold. Soon he changed his name (first to Echo and later, after a trademark dispute with another company, to Ecko), teamed up with his sister and another Rutgers student who wrangled financial backing, and started coming to trade shows like Magic to sell his designs under the banner of what would become Ecko Unltd. A lot of new brands, including his, were writing their names out in graffiti-style lettering, so he wanted a symbol instead. The obvious thing to do was lift some icon of the rising new hip-hop culture that so entranced him, like a turntable or a spray can. Instead he found his inspiration in his parents' Lakewood den, where his father kept a collection of kitschy little rhino statues. He didn't think about it so much then, but he has thought about it a lot since.

The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring. We've seen plenty of logos come and go since then, and of course they all start out with no particular meaning. A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines. Ecko's ads, in The Source and Vibe, had high production values and put the rhino on a surprising range of maverick recording artists who were not mainstream stars at the time—Talib Kweli, Beatnuts. Lucian James, whose branding agency, Agenda Inc., did some consulting projects for Ecko, points out that the rhino also referenced the symbol language most familiar to the then emerging youth culture: the language of the Polo pony and the Lacoste crocodile. The language of brands. The rhino both participates in this language and subtly satirizes it. "Rhinos are not exactly aspirational," James notes.

Sales went from $15 million in 1998 to $96 million by 2000, then rocketed to more than $400 million today. "I think it's like something sublime," Ecko said to me, speaking about successful logo icons in general. "When something is aesthetically beautiful, people react. And when you can assign a meaning and value to something and summarize or capture all of that instantly, that's something that I think human nature just gloms on to."

If it's true that symbolic meaning cannot be invented—that a symbol must tie back to an empirical reality to qualify as authentic and thus be embraced by consumers—then Ecko's success seems curious indeed. Here, after all, is an outsider suburbanite who created a logo that became synonymous with hip-hop culture and urban style.

BUT SYMBOLIC MEANING CAN BE INVENTED. AFTER ALL, THINK ABOUT RALPH LIFSHITZ. He grew up in a Bronx apartment, far from the milieu of the patrician upper class. He saw the swells in the movies and during the summers that he worked as a waiter in the Catskills, in the 1950s. He wanted to be like them, so he dressed like them, even in high school. Eventually his father, a Russian immigrant, changed the family surname to Lauren.

Ralph Lauren dropped out of city college, got a job as a seller of suits at Brooks Brothers and toiled away in the nether regions of the rag trade until he designed a line of fancy neckties that was picked up by Bloomingdale's in 1967. They were sold as emblems of status, under his new brand name, Polo. In her book The End of Fashion, journalist Teri Agins credits Lauren with going on to invent "lifestyle merchandising," building what looked like exclusive little boutiques, replicated in countless department stores. A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical 16-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an "authentic" one or not. # # # By Rob Walker