The New Consumer Psychology

Scanning buying behavior with MRI of the mind

Sang Min (Leo) Whang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317377863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The term 'consumption' is generally thought of as process by which individuals purchase goods and services. The New Consumer Psychology attempts to explain consumption as a social behavior that satisfies individual values and desires. In modern society, individual needs are no longer determined solely by age or gender, but by the life values and desires that one pursues. This book uncovers people's subjective experiences of consumption in the capitalist society with interesting inside stories ranging from politics to designer handbags.

The book also provides valuable consumer insights into business and individuals by going beyond the limitations of population statistics and demonstrates Q-methodology is used to analyse consumers' subjective responses. This book is an interesting take on how we should shift our focus from products to people and explains why identification and interpretations of different consumer groups are important in smart targeting. Its content will definitely inspire marketing strategies and market effectiveness.

PART I Psychology in the marketplace

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674001-1

1 The birth of consumer psychology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674001-2

When science meets the human mind

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, four pioneering scientists attempted to study the human mind: Jean-Martin Charcot, Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Binet. Their investigations varied slightly, but they agreed on one idea that the human mind can be studied just like the human body can be studied by a doctor. The public response went two ways: fear and curiosity.

The public was horrified at the possibility that scientists could use the human mind as an experimental object to be studied. The mind should not be such a thing at a time when it was believed that God created the mind and soul. How can a human study a human’s mind? But the public also showed great curiosity towards the idea that the study of the mind could change how humans were perceived. There was fear of stepping into an area that God had hidden, but there was hope as well. The hope to understand the human mind, which was thought of as a private and subjective area, through reason, was a reflection of the spirit of the times. People really began to believe in the power of science in the late nineteenth century. Now science turned the mind from something mysterious into something objective; or it began to anticipate being able to do that. People watched the process of psychology research under the name of memory research, or mental physics, with this mixed feeling of fear and curiosity.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when the public showed amazement and curiosity about mind study, there was one person who daringly tried to treat diseases of the mind much like treating bodily diseases. He was the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (Figure 1.1). At the time he showed that it was possible to treat mind disease through hypnosis, which was the latest technique. In this context, he ran a neurology clinic in Paris and applied the hypnosis technique to patients that showed symptoms of hysteria, paralysis, visual impairment, fainting, and amnesia, and treated them after thoroughly studying and classifying their conditions.

Figure 1.1 French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot treated his hysteria patients with hypnosis

There was a neurologist who was fascinated by watching Charcot treat his patients. He was the young Sigmund Freud from Vienna, Austria, who had just finished his residency (Figure 1.2). At that time, he came to France to get advanced medical training after his doctoral program. Freud was impressed by Charcot’s hypnosis treatment and he opened a clinic in Vienna that studied the human mind. At the time Freud was aware that abnormal behavior, or mental disease, was caused by the mind. Therefore he saw mental illness as a disease of the mind. His understanding was very controversial from the perspective of the day because back then when someone was hysteric, manic-depressive, or did something abnormal people believed it was a curse or the devil’s work. Freud thought these types of abnormal behavior were caused by a mental disorder; and he believed that a disease of the mind could be treated just like a doctor treated a diseased body. This is generally accepted as the beginning of what is now known as psychotherapy. Freud claimed that psychotherapy could be carried out through dialogue therapy—the “talking cure”— or psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating mental illness through a dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Figure 1.2 Portrait of Sigmund Freud

Figure 1.3 Freud's “analytical couch”

Figure 1.4 Wundt opened the first psychology-research laboratory at the University of Leipzig

Was it the scientists one following on the heels of another, who caused the sensation with their new study? Interest in psychology—the study of the mind— grew by leaps and bounds. However, there was a problem. Although it was intriguing and amazing to explore the mind, it was necessary to find out how useful this study could be in daily life. In order for psychology to be established as science, there had to be something tangible beyond just being interesting, and it had to offer specific assistance to people’s lives, or at least suggest a solution to a certain problem. Psychology remains controversial over a hundred years after it emerged as a new science between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the early twentieth century.

The idea that the mind becomes diseased and can be treated was strange enough, but the claim that it could be done through dialogue seemed to have gone too far. People whispered among themselves. Still, Freud was quite sure. He established his theory by studying the suppressed subconscious and how people would defend it. This led him to devise his clinical treatment that deals with mental illnesses through a dialogue between psychoanalyst and patient. Since then he has also become known for free association, emotional transference, and the psychotherapy technique that observes subconscious desires through dreams.

Unlike Freud, who explored the mind as he treated mental disorders, Wilhelm Wundt tried to investigate the human mind, hidden in normal behavior, scientifically. In 1879, he opened a psychology-research laboratory at the University of Leipzig and studied the human mind. At the time, his laboratory received great attention for introducing the experimental methodology of physics and physiology, which were praised as the hottest sciences. Many scholars came from Europe and the US to observe his research. They came thinking that studying normal people’s minds was on a different level to treating mental illnesses or abnormal behaviors, and they expected useful results from his research. However, it was not easy to find out what that result was. Dealing with the mind was very different from treating the body’s diseases. It was not like physics or chemistry, where a new law was discovered. The most difficult aspect was that it was hard to give any specific assistance to a particular mental domain despite knowing the condition of the mind. Thus, it was very difficult to pinpoint what people wanted to address in their life, what was really a problem, and what could be specifically gained from resolving that problem. Experimental psychology seemed to fail to establish itself as a science.

Psychology? What is that for?

Psychology started from the tradition of the natural sciences, with its usefulness as a practical science, and had an identity as a humanities and social science subject. The person who made psychology an emerging science clearly known to the general public was French psychologist Alfred Binet (Figure 1.5). It was thanks to the intelligence test he developed that psychology was recognized as having practical value. Binet made remarkable achievements in experimental psychology, abnormal psychology and child psychology. He developed the intelligence test in the early 1900s, with his colleague Theodore Simon, and it turned out to be helpful in everyday life and thus psychology came to a turning point.

Figure 1.5 Alfred Binet proved the usefulness of psychology with his intelligence test

Public interest does not last very long. Regardless of how engaging something is when introduced, it soon becomes old, and the public loses interest and enthusiasm very quickly. The theme of disease of the mind, introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, was definitely novel. Investigating how the normal mind, not just the diseased one, would react in everyday life was even more so. It was intriguing and new. However, unlike discovering new materials or treating a disease through scientific investigation, it was unclear how and where the investigation of the human mind could be used. In other words, it was difficult to show how the research results could be used in reality. Naturally, public interest dwindled.

Alfred Binet showed how psychological research could resolve real problems. At the time he was developing his intelligence test, France changed from a monarchy to a republic, and the city of Paris introduced a new public educational system in which everyone would receive an education. In the past, only males of a specific class, including aristocrats, could receive an education. Schools opened their doors to the general public. But there was a problem. People of diverse backgrounds and ages had to be taught together. There was even a situation as absurd as a nine-year-old child and a twenty-year-old adult sitting in the same classroom. Teaching materials were also inadequate for the mix of students.

What to teach to whom was a very serious consideration. Accordingly, Paris City Hall requested that Dr Binet resolve this problem as a psychologist and, as a result, the Binet-Simon test was born. Binet tried to assess each individual’s ability with a standardized test of intelligence. This example shows how useful it is to measure and distinguish each person’s mind. Intelligence research became a main field in psychology. Binet’s intelligence test is noteworthy as a special incident in early psychology because it is an example of directing curiosity in a purposeful way. At the time, scientifically studying the human mind came from nothing more than being someone with a new academic desire or unusual curiosity. At the news of a psychology laboratory that studied the mind being set up, many researchers from all over the world, especially the United States, visited Wundt’s laboratory, researchers who returned to America to teach psychology in universities. Since then, an interesting phenomenon has happened in America.

The psychological research that started at the level of curiosity, or scientific expectation, became an important activity that changed lives. The United States accepted psychology within the laboratory as an important scientific research method. American society’s tradition of pragmatism actively utilized psychology, a new area of study that explored the human mind, to solve practical problems. It applied psychological research results and methodologies to education, as well as the army, social programs and the resolution of various other problems, including economic activities. New psychological domains, such as educational psychology, developmental psychology, and industrial psychology all emerged around this time. Research into consumer behavior or consumer psychology was applied in the same way.

These days everyone is familiar with phrases like consumer psychology and marketing psychology. There are few who think there isn’t anything to it—if there is something to buy and one has money then one buys it. However, even just a half century ago matters were different. That was a time when the word ‘purchase’ was more fitting than the word ‘consume’—a time when it wasn’t a choice but a necessity to buy something. At that time, there was somebody who claimed that people’s (consumer) behavior, motive, and desire always applies. This was Dr Ernest Dichter, who actively applied psychological research to American daily life (Figure 1.6). An American psychologist, born in Austria, he was the first to give prominence to consumer behavior. Known as the “father of motivational research,” he was a marketing professional.

Figure 1.6 Ditcher used individual desires and unconscious motives to study consumer psychology

Dichter was the first psychologist to apply Freud’s psychoanalysis ideas and techniques to researching consumer behavior in the marketplace. He suggested the idea that an intrinsic, unconscious motive awakens individuals’ desires and this was widely applied to the advertising industry. In 1998 The New York Times described him as a figure who not only used the phrase “focus group” for the first time, but also made it well known how important image and persuasion is in advertising to the public.

Psychological research on consumer behavior began after World War II, when America’s market economy was at its peak. The enormous factories that had produced war supplies began to make various new products. The tremendous production capacity became directly related to the question, how can we sell more of these products that are pouring in? So experts began to find various ways to stimulate the public’s eyes and ears to get them to recognize new products and use them immediately. That is, they began to study ways to awaken the consumer’s purchase-desire, consumption-desire. Aggressive attempts to connect consumer behavior and the human mind started from here.

I am the sum of everything I own

In 1890, one book took the world by surprise by suggesting a new standard that people did not dare to think of. It was not the traditional yardstick of morality, rules, customs, or propositions. It was the self. The title of the book with this astonishing content is The Principles of Psychology (1890) and the author is William James, who is referred to as the father of American psychology. He claimed that individuals set a clear standard when determining ways of satisfying their desires, and that standard is the self. This is a very American standard that differs wildly from Europe’s traditional psychology. It was a perspective that was possible because America started as a nation of individuals, unlike Europe where democracy took place after revolution from tyranny. He saw the self, the foundation of an individual, as the measure above all. In The Principles of Psychology, he expressed the concept of self as:

In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his lands and horses … One man’s “self” is the sum of everything he can call “mine”. In what is “mine” various things are included starting with the body, clothes, house and land. ¹

It is a surprising and refreshing analysis. What an honest description of ordinary human life by someone who lived in the same era! If now, in the twenty-first century, someone living in Korean society was defined as such, he would undoubtedly be offended, thinking, “Do I look so materialistic? Who does he think I am to say such things?” Most people want to see themselves as someone who is much better than their actual selves (they want to think of themselves as more lofty beings than as animals that act on instinct). Regardless of whether this is agreeable or not, the self that James discusses is “the sum of everything I have.” If everything we own shows who we are then shouldn’t we know what we possess and what we want to possess to know ourselves as we are? Shouldn’t we look at it from a different perspective to before?

Dichter saw the mentality of wanting to have something as drive or desire. He expanded what Freud called the libido and life drive as the drive to consume. To him, psychological research was investigating how the desire of something arises, how p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Prologue: I shop, therefore I am
• Part I Psychology in the marketplace
• Part II Mission: case studies
• Part III The president and Louis Vuitton
• Epilogue: I exist, therefore I am happy
• Index