It’s all about you

The beauty of the You Sell is that all of the work of it happens in the consumers’ own head. Phrases like “Your burger, your way” tell us nothing about the product itself, and in this way, marketers keep the idea of individuality infinitely customizable. (What kind of burger is it? Any kind! The you-tell-us kind!) To one consumer, “Your burger, your way” might mean a double cheeseburger with all the fixings; to another, it means nothing but ketchup. Burger King doesn’t even have to guess. Not only does the You Sell force each consumer to do the mental work of conceiving the burger they want, but it has the added bonus of making each one feel as though they—not Burger King—are the authority on burgers. Ultimately, the consumer’s choice of burger becomes that much more significant to them because it appears to convey something essential about who they are. If the sell is effective, consumers won’t understand that they’re not in control. What a great formula for a business.

The You Sell ignores the inherent contradiction that if everyone is special, no one is special. It knows that you will ignore it, too. Media theorists have suggested that the best aspirational ads—in dangling that dream world in front of our noses—can actually function to make people envious of the version of themselves they might become. Affirmational ads, on the other hand, present us with an idealized You and entice us to fall in love with our own reflections.

Promiscuous with its praise, the You Sell embraces everyone equally because everyone’s a potential sale. But one of the great paradoxes of the You Sell is that the more we all buy into it—and the more store-bought “individualism” we express—the more homogenous we become as a group. There can only be so many meaningful status signifiers in the public’s consciousness at a given time—and the more status a product or brand carries, the more people choose to incorporate it into their personal-identity scrapbooks. We all wind up using the same signifiers to send the message: “There’s no one else like me!”

Critics of consumer culture may be quick to decry this approach as a product of corporate psychological engineering. But in fact, consumerism is always about symbiosis, as much as the anti-consumerism movement would like to downplay the free will of the average buyer of stuff. The You Sell is enormously successful right now, but it is largely a byproduct of a generation of relative political calm, technological advances, and spectacular economic growth. It exists because, for years now, people have had cash to burn. Increases in real income and decreases in family size have allowed for a major boom in discretionary spending. In 1973, American families spent, on average, 62 per cent of their annual economic output on primary necessities like food, housing, and clothes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2005, families spent only 49.6 percent—or just less than half. With so much extra cash, we had the luxury of allowing our needs to become more specialized, and less pragmatic. Faced as we are with a deeply uncertain economic future, this is a decidedly impractical mindset to hold.

And so, as tempting as it is to pin this consumer frenzy on the “corporate machine,” the You Sell is a machine we’ve all helped to build, and we feed it every day. “There’s a lot of tsk-tsking that goes on in popular conversation about how bad consumer society is but we’re on the producer side, too,” says Robert Kozinets, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “There is no giant robotic presence that’s doing this to us. When we talk about how it came to be, well, people must’ve wanted a lot of stuff.” We’ve always known that stuff costs money. The difference now is that the inner voice that used to tell us we can’t afford something has been increasingly drowned out by a ubiquitous refrain, played over and over again: You’re worth it. From a marketer’s standpoint, nothing could be easier than saying it. As for the rest of us, the real question is: why are we so desperate to hear it?

An adapted excerpt from The Ego Boom: Why The World Really Does Revolve Around You (Key Porter) by Steve Maich and Lianne George, available on Jan. 27