Who Do You Want to Be Today? Choosing Products, Creating Identities

This chapter addresses the connection between personal identity and choices from our cornucopia of market spaces. As we learn about, choose, use, and dispose of goods and services, we are simultaneously constructing and communicating who we are. “True identity . . . resides, not in our genes, but in our mind.”1 In this chapter, we first highlight the unique attributes of the American self. Because the construction of our social identities is a constantly changing, lifelong task, we allow economic activities to play significant social and cultural roles in our lives. A luxury watch company (Patek Philippe) asks its target audience, “Who do you want to be in the next 24 hours?”