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Bullish On Books
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In the new book, SPENT: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller reveals the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become more responsible friends and lovers and happier consumers.
Miller examines a wide range of familiar products and what they really say about us, from the Sims to Rolex watches, from L’Oréal lipstick to the Hummer.
In Spent you find out:
- Why luxury car brands, such as Lexus, advertise in places such as GQ - and get this - it's not to let rich potential customers know they exist
- Why kitchen appliances are now made of high-maintenance stainless steel instead of easy-to-care-for white enamel
- Why all cosmetics aim to recreate the stage at which women are at their highest level of fertility
- Why we’re such suckers for products such as Smartfood, Smartwater, and Smart Cars—and why marketers would never use the word “intelligent” in such products
- Why simple IQ tests would threaten the supremacy of Ivy League universities
- Why owning and caring for a pet is a good signal to a potential mate
- The real reason so many exercise machines are unused
- And why men are supposed to spend two months’ salary on engagement rings What marketers don’t know will hurt them
Below is a guest blog written for Bullish by Spent's author Geoffrey Miller a psychology professor at University of New Mexico.
Marketers still don’t understand human nature, and that hurts business.
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It’s been half a century since the Marketing Revolution turned business inside-out.
Marketing shifted management’s focus from what factories could produce to what consumers actually want. Especially in the Mad Men era of the early 1960s, marketing and advertising borrowed the best psychology available at the time to understand consumers – but that was a jumble of Freud, Maslow, Skinner, and social psychology. It’s the same jumble that shows up in most consumer behaviour and marketing textbooks, and that’s still taught in most MBA programs.
The conventional wisdom is that consumers are driven partly by reason but partly by emotion; that they’re vulnerable to various social and rhetorical influences; that they strive to express their wealth, status, taste, and ‘identity’ through their purchases.
That’s all partly true, but it’s kid stuff compared to what science has learned about human nature in the last 20 years.
The conventional wisdom acts as if humans were created from clay 8,000 years ago with an arbitrary list of unconscious ‘motives’ and irrational foibles, and as if consumer preferences vary capriciously across history and cultures. Businesses – and their shareholders – should be embarrassed to use such simplistic and misleading ideas.
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The truth is, evolutionary psychology has been astoundingly successful since about 1990 in mapping the complexities of human nature.
This new science is no longer a ragged old treasure-map of a few basic instincts (hunger, lust, curiosity).
Rather, it’s a Blu-Ray panorama of hundreds of human capacities and preferences that evolved to promote survival and reproduction in distinct ways under particular conditions.
Until a few years ago, evolutionary psychologists focused mostly on sexual attractiveness, mating preferences, social competition, parenting, kinship, and group conflict.
Recently though some of us have turned our attention to consumer behaviour. We’ve found that the conventional marketing wisdom is wrong about consumers, and so is most of economics.
The Rational Man model in economics assumed that we ‘maximize utility’ by rationally comparing and buying the goods and services that deliver the greatest ‘subjective utility’, or pleasure, or happiness. Researchers such as Robert Frank (Cornell University), Vladas Griskevicius (U. Minnesota), Gad Saad (Concordia U., Montreal), and Jill Sundie (U. Houston) are finding instead that we often buy products that we think will attract and impress mates friends, and relatives – regardless of whether they deliver any happiness. Conspicuous consumption is the norm, not the exception.
What traits are consumers trying to display through their Hollister shirts, Lexus hybrids, Yale degrees, and Alaskan eco-cruises?
The most important traits to display are the main ‘individual differences’ dimensions that have always distinguished one person from another, across cultures and throughout history. Given the obvious physical dimensions of age, sex, and health, we advertise youth or maturity, masculinity or femininity, athleticism or fertility through appearance-enhancing products such as make-up, clothing, and snowboards.
Then there are the psychological traits of competence, character, and virtue.
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Surprisingly, these boil down to just six central dimensions: general intelligence (IQ), and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.
Each is genetically heritable, predicts a wide range of behaviour; and is seen as a deep moral virtue.
If you know how someone scores on these Central Six traits, you can accurately judge how they’ll perform as a student, spouse, friend, or president.
In modern life, we display these Central Six traits largely through the products we buy, use, and display. The highly agreeable buy organic fair-trade espresso to show off their altruism; the highly disagreeable buy the Harley-Davidson ‘Fat Boy’ motorcycle favoured by the Terminator. The highly intelligent will acquire Stanford law degrees and Lexus hybrids; the less intelligent barely afford a high school diploma and a used Jeep Patriot. The highly conscientious pay bills on time, maintain high credit scores, and qualify for low-interest mortgages; the less conscientious make more impulse purchases of Kate Spade shoes, Gitanes cigarettes, and Trojan Magnum condoms.
As the collapse of Communism showed, we can’t eradicate people’s instincts for invidious trait-display. But we can influence how people display their key traits. That’s what branding is all about – creating common knowledge that a particular brand is symbolically associate with a certain set of intellectual, personality, or moral traits. The Green Consumerism movement is giving consumers an extra way to advertise their agreeableness (empathy, generosity) and conscientiousness (responsibility, concern for the future). The ‘Trading Up’ trend of mass luxury is giving consumers an extra way to advertise their intelligence (knowledge, judgment, product research ability) and openness to experience (interest in new ideas and fashions, and different cultures and aesthetics).
Given the global financial crisis and global brand competition, businesses must better understand how consumers strive to display their Central Six traits through the goods and services they buy. Consumption is not about materialism or conformism. It’s about broadcasting our traits to mates, friends, relatives, neighbours, and co-workers. The brands that help consumers do this trait-display in exciting new ways will prosper. The brands that are rely on out-dated theories of consumer psychology will fail.
Time to choose.
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Photo by: Norman Johnson Geoffrey Miller |
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