I’m With The Brand deals with the thorny issue of why we love our brands so much. Brands are, argues Rob Walker, the closest thing that many of us have to a religion. Even though we know that, for example Macs really are just as good as PCs and that brands like Nike are much the same as all the rest. Brands cause excitement in us – we become emotionally involved with them.

This book is about the way we are marketed to in an era where the old models of big agencies with big TV ads don’t get enough exposure to be useful. That said marketing budgets are going up, not down with budgets being spread ‘through the line’. Agencies and brands are finding new and stranger ways to make their product stand out from the crowd and appeal to new and old generations.

Perhaps the most scary aspect of this investigation is that we all are willing advertisements for brands, but some have taken this love for brands to new heights. Guerilla marketing, whereby ordinary folk try to sell products to others for no money are amazingly successful and profitable for brands – it is never about the financial reward for the sellers themselves. At first glance this seems counter-intuitive – surely there must be some reward – but take for example, this article in this blog (Bookgeeks). We write reviews of books we like and tell the world about them – so in effect we are doing the work of promoting the books for the publishers. Why do we do this, when Bookgeeks is a non-profit, non-paying endeavour? The answer is twofold; firstly we humans love to tell others about things which is why blogs in general are so pervasive. The second is that we also generally like to be in the know and know what others do not. So we Bookgeeks get sent previews of upcoming books to review. We love books and to get things first is our reward, as well as being listened to.

This book is recommended to anyone in the marketing field, especially those involved in any form of Guerrilla, viral or word-of-mouth advertising. It is a layperson’s guide to all the activities we generally invent and administer on a daily basis. I was surprised as much as Walker clearly is at just how far brands but also the general public will go to push products. I was also surprised by how well the “murketing” he speaks of actually works. Lastlty, I was also a little worried to find that I too have been marketing for some time.

I’m With The Brand is written in a journalistic way, simply because it is written by a journalist and compiled from his many articles. As such the prose rattles along at breakneck speed though (for my liking) skims across some fascinating areas prematurely. As such, I would recommend a companion book to this one – Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (as reviewed here on Bookgeeks by Simon Parker). A knowledge of some of the science of persuasion, including the rather obscure but very real placebo effect would have really helped this book. There are scientific findings and experiments but none that deal direct with the fallibility of our brains to be fooled. [See also: The Decisive Moment and Risk for more on the human brain and decision-making. Ed.]

So on to the cover. It is a work of genius, not least because your first impression is one of indifference. That rather dull Helvetica type is actually created from vectorised images of all of our favourite brands – moreover, just like the book argues, the brands create the type just like us – we are a product of our brands.

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