I MUST HAVE IT! Walking into your local shopping mall, you may think all the products are placed in no particular order. In fact, huge amounts of preparation go into placing products in a way that persuades you to buy. Many shops and malls deliberately organise themselves like a maze: once you’re in, it’s almost impossible to find your way out! It’s the same technique casinos use to keep the gamblers inside and spending. Many shops only have an up-escalator. If you want to be so troublesome as to leave their establishment, you’re going to have to pay the price and take the stairs. Ease of access is a huge driver of sales – no-one wants to put effort into buying things. That’s why the expensive goods (ones with the highest profit margins) are at eye level – not too high up and not too low down.
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Mixing nice and nasty: affective conditioning
Not only are we lazy and snobbish when it comes to buying, we’re also very weakminded. Place an object that you want to sell amongst other things that people think of as nice, and they’ll think that product is nice too! This trick works with pretty much anything: handsome movie stars sell watches; flowers and rainbows sell washing powder; cute puppies sell toilet paper. This is known as affective conditioning. In a clever experiment, scientists subliminally showed two groups of people either nice, fancy words like Tiffany’s or Jaguar, or cheap words like pound store. When offered a pair of socks to buy afterwards, the people who saw the desirable words were more likely to shell out on the expensive socks.
G U R U • I S S U E 3 • D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 • PA G E 1 8
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Beware: shopping addiction
Obviously, the clever techniques of marketing departments affect some of us more than others. A lot of our different shopping habits can be put down to how we all perceive and evaluate reward. A few interesting studies have emerged in recent years, drawing a curious parallel between the behaviour of shoppers and the behaviour of drug addicts. Within the brain, a chemical called dopamine (a ‘neurotransmitter’) helps transmit the feeling of reward in our brain. When we get a hit of dopamine, it feels great – it’s responsible for the pleasure a starving person gets after eating, or a lonely person gets after some affection from a loved one. It also gets released when taking drugs, and when you do a satisfactory piece of retail therapy!
Unfortunately – just like drugs – shopping can become addictive. People who are more impulsive and have lower levels of self-esteem are the ones most likely to become a ‘shopaholic’ – incidentally the very same traits associated with drug abusers. And just like a drug addiction, the pleasure after each shopping trip gets less as your body acclimatises to this increasingly boring experience. To get the same rush, you have to do it harder and faster. Although our collective relative wealth has increased hugely over the decades, our collective happiness, however, has flat-lined. Money does not, it seems, buy happiness. It has even been discovered that recent lottery winners and recent amputees reported the same level of happiness three years after their life changing event! Humans are very adaptable – we easily get used to an experience that once brought pleasure (or indeed pain).
Image: sxc • jaylopez
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Easy to enter – tricky to leave!