Although consumer choice has expanded greatly, marketers do not know much about why we buy. And neither do most consumers. Consumers can make decisions within two seconds, so the author conducted an experiment of scanning the brains of over two thousand people from five countries and found that buyers deceive themselves about their true motives. The author stated that rituals help form emotional connections to products better than logos do. I say: We cannot avoid the lies we tell ourselves, its only when we understand these lies can marketers become more effective.
***Update December 26th***In the article “The way the brain buys” from the December 20th issue of the Economist there is discussion of dwell time, the longer people stay in a store the more likely they will be to buy, the influence of the scent of freshly baked bread, which makes people feel hungry and encourages people to buy food, and the use of multi-sensory marketing (its still just marketing to me such labels!) to evoke subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories that may lead to increased purchases. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans the brain for activity and when consumers are shown products or brands it may help identify positive associations and aid in determining a winning product. The article states: This is immensely valuable information because eight out of ten new consumer products usually fail, despite test marketing on people who say they would buy the item but whose subconscious may have been thinking something different. Retailers and producers alike talk a lot about the “moment of truth”, the point when people standing in the aisle decide what to buy and reach for it.