Retail
therapy is a valuable way of cheering many of us up. It may or may not be an
expensive acquisition, and it may not have to be new, but we do like it to be
of a well-known brand. Indeed, some people are more obsessed with acquiring the
right brand than the particular object.
Clearly,
if this is a piece of artwork by a famous artist this makes sense, but if it is
your shoes or phone, it is not quite so easy to understand. Of course, the
enthusiasts for that brand will eulogize endlessly over many glasses of wine or
beer on the merits of that manufacturer’s product.
Now
it seems that our love for a brand can lead us to make decisions that are
completely unrelated. Murawski et al
have shown how our decision-making is affected by looking at a brand’s logo
just prior to making an unrelated investment decision (1). The team formed a scary alliance between
psychologists, neuroscientists and management/marketing people to tempt 18 young
students with offers of cash.
Of
course the big magnet was in play for fMRI studies and the human lab-rats were
flashed either a picture of a teacup (it was in Australia, so it wouldn’t have
been a coffee cup) or Apple Inc’s logo. They then had to make a choice between
getting $20 immediately, or a larger sum at a later date. The larger sums could
be quite large, but the wait for those could be up to 3 months.
Well,
nobody was very keen on jam tomorrow when tomorrow was many weeks away. I guess
at 22-years old your pecuniary needs are rather immediate. The big result
though, was that after seeing Apple’s logo, even short waits were too long and
they favored immediate gratification.
Clearly,
the Apple logo is very powerful as seen by the queues in Oz for the new iPad
with 4G even when the network is not fully developed there. But it is indeed
interesting to see that the must have, can’t wait emotion is generated for some
deal that has nothing to do with electronics, let alone an Apple product. The
prefrontal cortices of the lab-rats were lighting up in a wild display of decision
making.
Will
we see our marketing gurus fitting out personnel in stores with branded items
to ensure that customers will buy more potatoes because the store staff are
wearing fancy Nike-logoed shoes and shirts and using iPads? It seems that logo
power rules indeed.
