Buying In - (Page 45) buying in 45 of the consumer through the things they still control, like form and function and image. If you’re a clock maker, then what you have the power to change is you clocks and possibly how your clocks are perceived. So the produce of clocks, or most anything else, must inevitably behave as if the key to cracking the Desire Code lay in the object: To attract Consumer Economicus, build something that helps people solve a problem, or do a job, better than before. Some of the examples I’ve offered so far—skateboards, red hats, Hello Kitty—have already shown that the interaction between consumer and consumed is more subtle and unpredictable than simply figuring out consumer problems and dreaming up ways to solve them. Perhaps the most important reason for this is that we don’t always know, and could never really articulate even if we did, what problems we’re trying to solve until we encounter the solution. In the next chapter, I’ll get back to things consumed—and consumed on a mass scale. But to make clear what I mean when I say the dialogue between consumer and consumed is a secret one, this chapter deals not with specific brands and objects, but with us. A useful starting point can be found in a book called How Customers Think, by Gerald Zaltman, a fellow at Harvard University’s interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute. Borrowing a concept from social psychology, Zaltman dwells on the human tendency to rely on stories as a way of understanding and explaining the world—and ourselves. Naturally, we want to tell (and think) interesting and meaningful stories about ourselves—stories that are coherent, that add up. Zaltman argues that brands and logos and products have a place among the symbolic tools we use in telling those stories. Needless to say, we also reach for symbols that have noth-
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