ChasNote

Marketing has two functions, when you boil it down. One, to remind you to buy stuff you need (voice-over-IP phone service) or could imagine needing (Ginsu knives). This is direct-response marketing, and it often features a limited-time special price to lend urgency to that reminder.

The other purpose is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need but your desire for it somehow gets the better of you. This is brand marketing.

When it works — when a company creates a compelling brand associated with its wares — you begin to want stuff because to buy, wear, drink, drive, eat or smoke the variety that carries a particular logo makes you feel more complete. Taller, smarter, more compassionate, sexier and the rest.

Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for NY Times Magazine and the Murketing blog, calls this the Desire Code. His new book “Buying In” explores how and why it works — and it works, apparently, on just about all of us. “The fundamental tension of modern life,” he says on page 22, is this: “We all want to feel like individuals. [Yet simultaneously] We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.” Ramones t-shirts and Viking stoves, it turns out, help us bridge that divide. And it’s often the symbols (brands, logos and ideas) rather than the products themselves that perform the magic:

“Sales of skateboarding ‘hard goods’ — helmets and wheels and actual skate decks — totaled around $809 million. But sales for T-shirts and shoes and other ’soft goods’ brought in much more, around $4.4 billion…. It has become possible to participate in the idea of skateboarding without actually skateboarding.”

The book publishes in early summer, but chapters are available online at Random House.