I'll Buy What She's Buying

When you were a child, your parents decided what kind of clothes you'd wear.
When you were a teenager, your friends basically decided what kind of clothes you'd wear.
And now that you're an adult, you have finally become so independent that YOU decide what kind of clothes you'll wear. Right?

WRONG!

At least if you're willing to believe Martin Lindstrom, a marketing guru and expert on the human psychology of consumer decision-making. In his book Brandwashed, he goes so far as to compare us with the animal world in the way we copy the behavior of our fellow human beings and look towards them for guidance:

"In other words, only by observing and mimicking the behavior of its neighbors can a termite figure out what it should be doing. We as consumers, I've observed time and again, act in much the same way. Just like those birds and those termites, we, too, are wired with a collective consciousness in that we size up what those around us are doing and modify our own actions and behaviors accordingly." (p. 106)

In essence, he's saying that you may not necessarily be looking to your parents or friends for help in choosing what to buy, but you're definitely influenced by the people who surround you when it comes to making product decisions. It seems that peer pressure is not just for adolescents, but a general human "problem":

"As the scientists put it, '(The) research suggests that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals,' and that it takes a mere 5 percent of 'informed individuals' to influence the direction of a crowd of up to two hundred people. The other 95 percent of us trail along without even being aware of it." (ibid.)

Maybe you belong to those 5 percent and are always influencing the direction of others. Then you have a pretty big responsibility in leading them to good and virtuous things (and in this case products). But for the rest of us, it's time to realize that we're probably not as independent in our consumer decisions as we'd like to think. Because ultimately "...we as human beings never assess ourselves, our behaviors, or our decisions in a vacuum; we assess them in relation to everyone else." (p. 108)

Now before you start to protest and say that there has got to be a way to avoid that, let me throw an interesting thought out there: maybe it's not so bad that we're that way. After all, we were always meant to be social creatures, working and living together, depending on each other in all kinds of situations. Being able to identify the behavior of those around us and thus modifying our own accordingly helps to avoid tensions and problems that so easily arise in human interaction. Nonetheless, it's probably not a bad idea to reflect a bit more on who we're looking to when deciding what kind of pants we should buy.

Let's try to keep in mind that "...in the end what we buy really has little to do with what we want and more to do with what we think we should want." (p. 118)