Buying In, Trading Up, it’s all Freakonomics

Reading business and marketing books are perhaps the last things I had envisioned myself being interested in if you had asked me a year ago. And now, I can’t get enough of them. Once you’re sucked into the ongoing realities of the business and marketing industry, it’s hard to pull away.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
By Rob Walker

This is an absolutely fantastic book on the new evolution of marketing, or as Rob Walker calls “murketing”, where traditional advertising and methods no longer work on our technology savvy consumers. He touches upon numerous examples to explain why and sometimes how we buy certain products. Can anyone think of a reason why Red Bull exists? Or why you bought it in the first place? Or, more importantly, who is Red Bull targeting exactly?

Marketers are continually finding ways to innovate and infiltrate us, showing up at our hangouts, giving out freebies at the water park, to get us to buy new products.

Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods And How Companies Create Them
By Michael J. Silverstein, Neil Fiske, John Butman

How can you imagine a world without Victoria’s Secret, Callaway golf clubs, Mondavi wine, or the ultra slick BMW car? Well there was a time where the market for all of these industries was flat and uninteresting. This is a book that explores how some of the most recognized lifestyle brands have achieved success by offering consumers a better quality product at premium prices. Trading Up is a natural progression, people like new things, and even better when they outperform the old stuff. By personal experience, I would say Japanese 7Eleven trumps our dépanneurs by a longshot, yet the corner store concept isn’t anything new. But if you give consumers a distinctive advantage in better products and service, they will definitely flock to a 7Eleven store than your Couche Tard any day.

Trading Up is a good book to read if you want to find out how some brand names have made it, and can definitely help budding business entrepreneurs get into the mix.

Freakonomics : A rogue economist explores the hidden side to everything
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Here’s a book that doesn’t have much relations to fashion itself, but nonetheless finds an interesting link between what we perceive a certain situation or event to be rather than what really happens. Such as there’s a strong link between abortions and the fall of rate crimes, or how drug dealers and their gangs operate much like legitimate businesses and that violence drives away the customers. So eventhough the media may report or explain things that make a lot of sense, often times they’re really just deducing what seems logical rather than looking outside of the box for another kind of cause.

If Freakonomics can be applied to today’s fashion industry, we can trace back all trends to specific subcultures, no matter how minute, that trickles down to the stores you shop in and into your closet, even if you’re not particularly aware of the numerous influence and years of innovation it took to have that specific piece of clothing on your back.