How long does it take to read The Naked Consumer?
The Naked Consumer by Erik Larson takes about 5 hours 3 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 3 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1992. 275 pages, about 75,625 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 3 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 9 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
One week after the birth of his second daughter, author Erik Larson stepped out of his front door to find a sample package of Luvs diapers, courtesy of Procter & Gamble. How does a company know the most intimate details of family life? In The Naked Consumer, Larson turns the tables on the snoops and spies: Who are these people who annually record the due dates of 900,000 women in a "Young Family Index," rent each of our names 152 times a year, and make telemarketing. Pitches to 18,000,000 of us every day? And who are the people who have transformed coupons for our favorite items into tools of espionage? Why do we Americans, who claim to revere privacy so much, allow ourselves to be filmed, taped, and analyzed by private-sector corporations seeking no loftier achievement than to sell us the same old toothpaste? Just as the advertising industry focused on motivation research in the 1950s, today corporate America relies on mass. Surveillance to sell its products. As consumer researchers systematically violate our privacy, erode our civil rights, and reinforce class stereotypes, they produce a business culture that shies away from risk and innovation and pays more attention to manipulating our needs and values. Erik Larson's penetrating study chronicles this wildly obsessive and frighteningly intrusive pursuit of the American buyer: how companies use spies, hidden cameras, even sonar and EEG. Machines to understand what makes shoppers tick - and how, in the process, they've accelerated the blanding of America.
Subjects: Marketing research, Consumption (Economics), Consumer education, Right of Privacy, Marketing, Recherche
