Paradox

Laura Miller at Salon tells a story from Rob Walker's book about consumers and corporate brands, Buying In:

Bike messengers in the Pacific Northwest made a Milwaukee beer the brew of choice in the indie-rock scene.
....
PBR was ... sure-footed: The brewer carefully cultivated its image among the indie crowd by taking great care not to cultivate its image: no ads on local radio, no celebrity endorsements (despite nibbles from Kid Rock) and certainly no TV. PBR's divisional marketing manager, cribbing tactics from Naomi Klein's anti-corporate manifesto, No Logo (full of “many good marketing ideas,” he told Walker!), worked to make PBR “always look and act the underdog.” He was so successful at retaining the brand's cachet (or anti-cachet) that one 28-year-old Oregonian whom Walker interviewed had a foot-square Pabst logo tattooed onto his back. “Pabst is part of my subculture,” the kid told the writer, pointing to the absence of Pabst advertising as evidence that “they're not insulting you.”