Marketing to 21st Century Buyers

I just read a WSJ commentary on another book that "discovers" what marketing is about.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, By Rob Walker, (Random House, 291 pages, $25)

In the WSJ article (which also relates stats and discoveries about the new marketing successes written about in the book, which discusses whether buyers can be "bought" by a brand), a buried comment says...

"The most powerful sales campaigns, Mr. Walker says, get their hooks into the consumer's "interpreter," a term he borrows from psychologists to describe the rationalizing corner of the brain. And the stimuli to which 21st-century interpreters respond, it seems, are those that signal authenticity, identity and community."

My question is, how new or different is this discovery? Is what consumer's respond to these days really that unique from any other decade?