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Powell’s asked me to write an essay for their newsletter, in connection to Buying In. Here’s a short outtake:
On a cultural level, I understand why people want to wall off consumer culture into its own category, something we don’t have to take all that seriously. Critiquing what we buy and why tilts into the commercial marketplace in ways that just don’t feel as serious, as, say, critiquing works of art — even if the definition of “works of art” has gotten pretty fluid. (Somehow a quasi-scholarly critique of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, seems more like what we think of as criticism than a deconstruction of who buys Red Bull, and why.)
But consumer culture is serious….
Read the whole thing here.
Further diversion may be found at MKTG Tumblr, and the Consumed Facebook page.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
I really enjoy the column and the question of what makes consumers tick (both me and the customers I work to make products for).
On the other hand the idea of studying consumerism also validates it which is unsettling to me in an age when we are already pitched to way too much. Maybe understanding how those pitches work helps us filter out the crap and get to the things we after in life, but isn’t that just more efficient consumerism?
It’s analogous in some ways to media coverage of national political races – national media get called out for spending too much time on the machinations of political strategy and too little on the issues.
Similarly, when your column looks beyond products, consumption and marketing to examine how people reach personal or community values through consumption, that’s the good stuff. But I still enjoy reading all the tactical stuff too.