In these dark times, being more of a glass-half-full guy, I was drawn to Lee Eisenberg’s new book by its hopeful title: Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What.

Eisenberg, who authored the best-selling The Number, is a former Esquire editor who also served as executive vice president at Lands’ End. (For me, a larger claim to fame is his role as a participant in the first Rotisserie baseball league.) His new work is an eminently readable, if severely abridged, history of the psychology of the American consumer.

The subtitle is a bit of a red herring. I’m sure it and even the title are aimed at catching the eye of harried retailers and marketers, who are desperate for any bit of good news these days. I don’t think they need to worry quite so much. Media coverage of trends like The New Frugality aside, of course people will still keep buying. We’re Americans, after all. It’s what we do.

The book is not so much an attempt to reassure but more to reassess. In the course of his leisurely and enjoyable stroll through consumerism, Eisenberg doesn’t uncover or claim to have uncovered one main reason why we buy, which will no doubt disappoint readers who are looking for that type of revelation. Rather, through interviews with some of the oft-cited thinkers and intelligent, easily-digestible summaries of the main ideas of others, he offers a good overview of the many theories on why we buy, one that introduces and highlights the ideas of writers like Thorstein Veblen, Vance Packard, Gerald Zaltman, Dan Ariely and Paco Underhill and allows the reader to make worthwhile comparisons.

Personal experiences

Eisenberg grounds his journey in his own personal experiences as a consumer (some of the anecdotes are enlightening, some are distracting) and thanks to his playful style and liberal use of a slangy lexicon of terms like Sell Side, Advangelists, Adbashers and Buy Scolds, the proceedings are never dull. Here’s a passage from the section on how marketers (the Sell Side) gather and use information on our buying habits:

“You may be in a hurry or you may be killing time. You may be on a specific buying mission of simply browsing. You may be a regular customer or a one-time drive-by. You may be young, old, in between. You may be rich or trying hard to scrape by. You may be somebody or nobody. Check that. To the Sell Side, nobody’s nobody. Everybody amounts to an actionable intelligence: precious, detailed, and copious. So the Sell Side keeps its eyeballs fixed. There’s nothing seriously threatening about it, nothing untoward. For the Sell Side, it just pays to snoop.”

The opening sections of the book are a whirlwind tour of great moments in motivational research history, touching on Packard and Ernest Dichter and the many ways that sex may or may not be part of our consumption choices.

Elsewhere he explores various currently popular theories (brands are dead, consumer-generated buzz is king, etc.) by visiting some of the companies proffering those theories. Recounting his interview with veteran shopping analyst Paco Underhill, he notes Underhill’s “big headline” for the early 21st century: the brand war is over. Meaning that private labels have won, that while we are aware of brand names, their power is “evaporating in the face of comparable and cheaper alternatives.”

“As this trend expands,” Eisenberg writes, “we’ll have less reason to talk ourselves into believing, or allow the brand to talk us into believing, that Huggies fulfill their diapering responsibilities any better than Walgreen’s nappies. Widespread generic substitution is but one sign that we now live in the Age of Cheap…”

Other interesting sections include his looks at the people who are investigating how our brains respond to the act of buying. He cites the specific brain regions that are excited (or repelled) by the act of opening up one’s purse or wallet and finds out why that poor robot in the General Motors spot from the 2009 Super Bowl produced “feelings of economic security” in some viewers.

He charts the downsides of bucketing, his term for the use of demographics and other data to predict what we will do as consumers, one of which is its imprecise nature.

That imprecision is one of the many reasons I sympathize with marketers. For as many labels you can put on us, as many buckets as you can drop us into, for as many messages you can target at us, we are still human, after all, and that makes us prone to acting on a whim, or not acting at all. Everything can have aligned perfectly to facilitate a sale, and the buyer can still turn on a dime and walk out the door.

To me, the act of marketing ends up being one of playing percentages. Your data shows that consumers who live here, who read these magazines or frequent these Web sites are more likely than others who don’t to be interested in your product. So you craft the best message, put it in a place you think will reach them and then cross your fingers.

Eisenberg writes about how Packard and other commentators tend to ascribe dark intentions to all of the marketers out there who are keeping tabs on us and constantly attempting to manipulate us. Undoubtedly a lot of that manipulation works, but again, just look at the amount of time, money and brainpower going into figuring out what drives us to spend. In many ways, while we are more knowledgeable about the motivations behind buying, it feels like layers of an onion are being peeled away. We’re no closer to the Buy Button than we were before. As long as we continue exhibiting our maddeningly human traits I think in the game of marketing it will always be advantage: consumer.

Helpful reminder

With its quasi-historical perspective, the book is also a helpful reminder, in this age where terms like groundbreaking and revolutionary are applied all too liberally to “new” modes of marketing and marketing theory, of how few really original ideas there are out there and also how consumers’ buying habits have been vexing marketers for decades. For example, branded entertainment undertakings like BMW’s slate of Web-only mini-films starring Clive Owen as The Driver were really not that different from the 1920s radio show The Maxwell House Hour or The Wrigley Party, yet they were heralded as cutting-edge when they debuted in 2001. (To be fair, the BMW shorts were also tremendously successful!)

The last chapter, Shoptimism, makes some final observations, in the form of four “Good Buys,” and offers tips on how readers themselves can make the act of buying (or not buying) more satisfying. Rather than focus on buying things as a source of satisfaction, Eisenberg recommends tracking your activities for a weekend and then going back and grading them on a scale to see how happy or worried or frustrated, etc., each activity made you. Once you compile your happiness/unhappiness scores, do more of what makes you happy. Sounds easy, right?

There are no real ahas here but rather an equally satisfying number of nods of the head, as Eisenberg’s observations, or explanations of others’ observations, hit home. The book is likely to be stimulating for most marketers and researchers on a professional level while also being enjoyable for personal reasons. We’re all consumers after all, and who doesn’t like to spend a few moments pondering the many factors that underlie how and why we spend our money? 

Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What (334 pages; $26.00) is published by Free Press (www.simonandschuster.biz).