How Shoppers Make Decisions in a Recession |
Written by Administrator |
Tuesday, 19 May 2009 08:21 |
By Sean Gregory Monday, May. 18, 2009
In this groundbreaking 2008 book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, Danish brand consultant Martin Lindstrom showed how neurology, as much as economics, drives consumer behavior. One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World, Lindstrom talks to TIME's Sean Gregory, during a business trip in Thailand, about what's buzzing around our brains in this recession. There have been some signs, though fleeting, of a possible economic rebound. What's the consumer thinking right now? So what exactly is happening in the consumer brain? That's really a survival mechanism we have as human beings. And we may even not at a conscious level be able to explain why we're cutting back. We're just doing it. You will just do it by intuition. And if you start to save money by intuition, you will never ever question it again.
So companies are trying to find the triggers they have to pull on in order to make people feel comfortable about spending money. The best example of that was Hyundai, which said you can return your car within a year if you lose your job and get a refund. That's a major change you will see in marketing. And then you will see companies start to build the very functional, practical dimensions of their brands. If you take Louis Vuitton as an example, they will say, "In the future, when you buy a Louis Vuitton bag, it's not just the most fashionable bag on the market, it also has a two-in-one dimension so you can turn it inside out, and it's red today and black tomorrow. You can use the bag both in the evening and the morning, and you don't have to buy a bag for four years because it has two color dimensions to it." Also, companies will start to talk about the past rather than the future. We're seeing that happening a lot with brands now. They're saying, "Hey, if you talk about the past, people feel safe." For instance, I went on a summer holiday, and it was a disastrous holiday. The weather was crap, the food was bad and the hotel was bad. But when you look at the photos from that holiday two years later, you kind of forget all the bad memories you had. That's exactly what's happening in our minds. Companies will start to push the past more than the future, because we feel kind of warm and soft for the past, and trust the past a lot more. Because brands are all about trust, they're going to push that dimension a lot more. That's exactly what Louis Vuitton is doing. Take any of the latest Louis Vuitton ads they're running right now: they're actually promoting various actors who are not hot anymore. They're putting them in settings which are from the '60s, the '50s, and basically you feel you are buying the past. Source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1899035,00.html |
Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 08:26 |