The Church of the Customer blog last week ran a good interview with Rob Walker, New York Times columnist and author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.

We’ll let you read the full interview on their blog but here’s thought from Rob to ponder this morning:

Media coverage of how technology empowers consumers has tended to
gloss over how technology empowers marketers. Marketers see the various
threats to traditional modes of persuasion, and have invented new ones,
ranging from product placement to online campaigns to word-of-mouth
marketing.

As for the latter, we’ve always trusted our friends
more than television ads. Only recently have marketers figured out how
to tap that directly by signing up tens of thousands of folks who
volunteer to get products early and talk them up and so on. This
leverages the "endowment effect" (the tendency to overvalue something
simply because we own it), and, in effect, converts your friends into a
marketing medium. That’s new.