Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker, opines that we’re not only what we buy. That would be obvious: We all aspire to live in a Pottery Barn catalogue and have our kitchens arranged by Martha Stewart. Sometimes we want cute shoes and cell phones that will enable us to be marketed to even as we drive distracted. Sometimes we buy stuff, not because we like it, but because it’s outside the image we think others have of us. We buy to appear to be on the edge of our comfort zone.
Which brings me to Buying In and its nifty discussion of the stealth marketing campaign that gave us the world’s best beverage, even better than Tab (go ahead and yuk it up, younguns, but Tab is an iconic drink, and I care not that it tastes like it could peel paint off farm fencing): Red Bull.
The book notes that Red Bull’s initial marketing ploy was a murky, seemingly stealth ad campaign — none of those nice old ladies handing out cuplets of free brew at the Wal-Mart. Red Bull wasn’t a soda, not a bottled water. It fell firmly in the new category of ”energy drink,” and there wasn’t really a brand pattern for marketing an energy drink — at least not beyond the idea that it’s 3 p.m. and you have to at least feign alertness until 6 p.m. and even if you don’t know what’s in taurine, how bad could it be? Hence Red Bull established itself as both a stoked beverage for participants in extreme sports, a pick-me-up for office drones and a bar drink for college students. And nobody paid too much attention to dispelling all those urban legends about whether taurine came out of a naughty bit of the bull or was an aprodisiac or whether in some countries Red Bull could only be dispensed in pharmacies: “Some pointed to the drink’s caffeine content, and one theory was that Red Bull with liquor acts like a poor man’s speedball.”
And therein is the genius of stealth marketing: If somebody is watching you read that, you’re pretending to be absolutely appalled. But if you’re by yourself, you may be thinking, where is the vodka? That’s why Red Bull is a hugely successful drink, marketed by giants in the marketing world, even if they be Austrian giants, and I will buried with a sugar-free can of it by my side. No use waiting in line at the Convenience Store of the Afterlife.
Recently, I did an article in which we did a taste test of the various energy drinks, none of which has really taken off like Red Bull. (Although I did get a call from a marketer for an urban energy drink called Pit Bull, which was being targeted to your deeply urban convenience stores, and I am sorry to say that they never sent along a can, because I surely would have tried it.) And the truth is, Red Bull tastes like something you chipped off the interior of your dirty dishwasher, but it’s a taste that you can get used to and even come to crave. And still: When you’ve got a three-hour drive, NPR ain’t getting the job done. You need three Red Bulls, ice-cold, and a bag of Cheetos.
And the thought of Cheetos brings me to the new Susan Powter book. Truly, I had no idea that Susan Powter — you’ll remember her from her “Stop the Insanity!” craze, which posited that to lose weight you need to exercise a lot and eat better — was still around and scoring book deals. But she is: The Politics of Stupid is her new book, and really, it’s time to freshen the message. Or get a message. Or not pose in a catsuit. I am a sucker for two categories of trash literature: true crime books and diet books, but you have to understand in writing such books that you’ve got to get a least a nugget of sense in there. Otherwise you’re just recycling, or posing, or going directly to the remainder bin.
Consider this sentence, and wonder with me if Powter ever met an editor: “Something I hear over and over again, and it’s something that never ceases to amaze me, because if you are overfat, you are bulky already. Fat is wide. Fat is what’s dripping over your jeans. Fat is waddy (Truman’s note: And in Kentucky, Waddy and possibly also Peytona.) Fat is what’s hanging from your body not lean muscle mass, and if it is lean muscle mass hanging from your belly, even I suggest you run to your local emergency room and get checked out.”
I have no idea what this means. But it makes me want a Red Bull. After all, it’s 3 p.m. somewhere.
