Why is it so hard to stop shopping? — Part 1: Marketing
According to studies, we have closets full of clothes but 12–50% of them lie unused, and just in Sweden 2 million functional mobile phones, not older than 4 years are stored at homes but not used. Clearly we have more stuff than we need and this takes a toll on the planet. During the production process of all this stuff, waters get polluted, animal habitats destroyed and tons of CO2 emitted just so we can fill our home with stuff that we don’t even need or use. For a sustainable future we must reduce our consumption and be more purposeful with our purchases. But it is so damn hard to say no to that cute blue T-shirt, or to that trendy gadget.
But why? Why is it so hard to stop shopping? There are many reasons and with this article series my goal is to discuss them one by one. I believe we are more prepared to change our consumption patterns, if we understand why we buy in the first place. Especially if we understand that most of the time we buy because someone else wants us to buy, not because we genuinely need the thing. Let’s start with a mammoth one: marketing.
Today marketing is everywhere all the time. Billboards scream at us as we drive to work, influencers influence as we scroll social media and we can’t even watch a movie without an in-your face kinda product placement.
But it hasn’t always been like this. Persuasive communication to sell more goods and services has been around since trading started. Printed ads in newspapers appeared in the 17th century but it was the 19th century when marketing fundamentally changed. The industrial revolution put companies in a never seen before position: there were more products on the market than people wanted to buy. Companies’ needed more intense, more sophisticated and more targeted sales communication to convince people to buy their products. Advertising agencies come to the rescue. First they were only brokers of advertising space in newspapers but in the early 20th century they started engaging in content production too. In the beginning they built campaigns based on trial and error to figure out what works on consumers, but it quickly became clear that there is a need for a more ‘scientific’ approach. Market research, psychology and behavioural science insights become the basis of agencies’ work.
Edward Barnaise in the 1920’s was the first to build a communication strategy on psychology insights. He understood that since people’s basic needs were already satisfied, selling products based on practical function will not do any more. In order to sell more, the messaging has to target the unconscious and must appeal to deeply held motivation, visceral fear, and/or carry a symbolic meaning. Not long after this revelation, in the 1930’s, the concept of consumer engineering started to spread. Consumer engineering refers to the practice of using the knowledge about the human mind to generate consumers. In other words: make people buy stuff even if they don’t need it. By the 1960’s businesses set up their own marketing departments and consumer experts trained in the methods of psychology or statistics had become a fixture in the world of business.
In the early 2000’s the ever increasing competition and consumers’ rising indifference toward traditional marketing called for concern. Marketers had to find new ways, hopefully more subliminal ways, to influence consumer behaviour. That is when neuroscience entered the picture. Instead of listening to people, marketers wanted to look straight into our brains. Neuromarketing is all about measuring physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas. The most common methods used to measure brain activity are fMRI and EEG (see picture below) so scientists and markets can see which part of our brain got activated by a stimuli.
Another way is to measure physical reactions to estimate brain activity. For example using special glasses that follow our gaze to know where our attention goes as well as register pupil dilation to measure arousal. Measuring facial-muscle activity (muscle coding) with electrodes that pick up on the slightest movement is another tool. This helps marketers understand if we are frowning or smiling when we are exposed to stimuli even if our facial expression doesn’t change drastically. Biometrics, such as heart and respiration rate, are easily measurable and can be a good signifier of our reactions. The massive amount of intimate information collected helps companies to fine tune their message, find the most stimulating color palette and even scents to make us buy more.
Getting the message right however is only one side of the equation, this message has to reach the customer to have an impact. There is an increasing arsenal of channels through which marketers can reach us. Marketing has always been on the forefront of utilizing new technologies for persuasive purposes. In the early days printing allowed the placing of advertising in newspapers and magazines. Then came radio and television and commercials have become a part of everyday life. With the arrival of the telephone marketers got a direct contact to the consumer and telemarketing started. As computers and the internet became mainstream it turned into the most efficient way to connect with consumers. The internet provided the opportunity for more direct advertising, like banners on webpages, but more importantly the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of the marketing effort, for example in terms of click-through rate. As computers and later smartphones become an integral part of our lives, companies could gather more data about us: our preferences, habits, personality, etc. Today, we are at a point where sophisticated algorithms can learn our preferences in minutes (TikTok) and social media platforms can profile us down to the last cell (Facebook). And all this nuanced understanding is used, you guessed it, to sell us more stuff. Companies understand our desires more than ourselves and have the necessary tools and insight to optimize what message they should show to whom at what time on which channel in order to maximize sales.
Paid advertising is only part of the picture though. Social media is a major game changer that brought the blessed service of influencers, lifestyle marketing, and most recently social commerce. We are still in the early days of social commerce which leverages social interaction to make us buy things. This means that if users like a product an influencer promotes on their social media, they can easily buy it within the app and skip the hassle of going to a third party eCommerce app. Since the younger generations are more inclined to buy through social media platforms, integrating shopping into the platforms where they live a major chunk of their social life holds big promises, from the companies’ perspective, and big threats, from an environmental and societal perspective.
The biggest twist in all of this, is that we (the consumers) pay for getting brainwashed by all this marketing. We either pay the price of a product that includes the cost of marketing, or we use a product for free (e.g: Facebook) that in turn sells our data to finance their operation. Which is of course used to gain more insight into our preferences and sell us more stuff.
We have to see that there is a tremendous power asymmetry here. On one side there are the companies dedicating ample resources and entire departments to build a profound understanding of the customer and then use this information to target their weak points and subconscious to sell more stuff. On the other side there is the consumer, who is the sufferer of 6.000–10.000 ads per day, not protected from manipulative marketing, and doesn’t even know that their brain is tinkered with. Preparing consumers for responsible consumption is not a part of general education, and unfortunately there is no highschool class about “How companies are trying to get you to buy their stuff, here is how you can say no”. And let’s not forget that no one asks consumers if they want to be exposed to marketing. We are bombarded with sales messages regardless if we want it or not. If consumers want to reduce the harm of marketing, they have to put the energy into educating and protecting themselves. And even then they have little power over non-consensual adverts in public spaces.
Advertising and active sales messaging are clearly a major reason why we buy more stuff than we need, but the impact of marketing goes even deeper. Constantly being exposed to marketing, which is the case in the western society, also shapes our expectations toward material possessions and influences how we formulate our identity.
“The consumer culture encourages us not only to buy more but to seek our identity and fulfillment through what we buy, to express our individuality through our “choices” of products.” (1)
Thus symbolic meaning is more important than the actual function of the object.
“The symbolism inherent in consumer goods can be defined as the images of “idealized people associated with [the good]”, and the message is that buyers do not only consume the actual good advertised, but also its symbolic meanings (successful, happy, attractive, and glamorous), thus moving closer to the ideal identity portrayed by media models.”(1)
So marketing shapes our expectations towards ourselves and our lives and we construct our ideal self partly building on what we see in the media.
“Through the advertising and fashion industries, consumer culture presents individuals with images that contain “lifestyle and identity instructions that convey unadulterated marketplace ideologies (i.e., look like this, act like this, want these things, aspire to this kind of lifestyle)”.” (1)
In conclusion, companies are using ever more intrusive techniques to gather information about consumers and their minds which provides them the necessary insights to build powerful and persuasive marketing. Consumers are unprotected and mostly unaware of these techniques and thanks to the constant exposure to consumerist messages the general belief is that happiness equals material wealth.This is an urgent problem because the planet is the victim of this mindless pursuit of more. As long as the main goal of the companies is to sell as much as possible and as long as consumers are not prepared to say no, we are in trouble, and the trend of excessive consumption will continue.
Sources
- Dittmar, H., (2007) The Costs of Consumer Culture and the “Cage Within”: The Impact of the Material “Good Life” and “Body Perfect” Ideals on Individuals” Identity and Well-Being Psychological Inquiry, 18:1, 23–31, DOI: 10.1080/10478400701389045
- Highly recommend to read this The Guardian article, that has a similar core message than this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/11/advertising-industry-fuelling-climate-disaster-consumption
