Special offers, CELEBRITY SIGHTINGS and life envy are just some of the triggers that make us reach for our credit cards. SARAH HALLIWELL talks to experts and real women and asks why we buy WHAT WE BUY
Alright, I’ll go first. I was browsing in a London department store when I spotted author JK Rowling at the sales counter. There is always something mesmerising about the high-level grooming and general glossiness of someone famous and I furtively watched to see what she was buying. She put on a designer dove-grey fedora and instantly looked fabulously mysterious and glamorous. As she paid and then swept out of the store incognito, lugging armfuls of bags, I was compelled to buy the same fedora. I don’t know why: I love hats, but I have no paparazzi to hide from, and the fedora makes me look like a Sloane going off shooting in her Range Rover, whatever I try it on with. Needless to say, despite the eye-watering expense, I have not worn it once.
Sometimes it’s straightforward time pressure, or the intoxicating, frantic atmosphere of a sale that propels us to the cash desk – but it’s the more irrational and subconscious impulses, like the one I experienced, which are harder to explain. Or are they? Copying others is a natural reaction, explains Pete Lunn, behavioural economist at Dublin’s Economic and Social Research Institute. “There’s this consensus that consumers have a strong idea of what they want and are very discerning. But studies suggest this is total nonsense. It turns out that consumers are in fact really malleable – they’re uncertain and find it extremely hard to judge what things are worth. And so one habit is to buy what other people buy – the posh term is ‘behavioural convergence’.”
There’s this consensus that consumers have a strong idea of what they want and are very discerning. But studies suggest this is total nonsense. It turns out that consumers are in fact really malleable – they’re uncertain and find it extremely hard to judge what things are worth.
Philip Graves, consumer behaviour expert and author of Consumer.ology: The Market Research Myth, the Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping, confirms our sheep-like instincts. “We tell ourselves that we are independent and original, but really we are creatures of habit, constantly scanning other people and unconsciously computing images of what’s okay to wear.”
“The Kate Effect is something we notice all the time,” says Daniela Puzzi, a personal shopper at Harvey Nichols. “The first instance was the blue Issa dress Kate Middleton wore for the official engagement photographs, of course – we were inundated with calls from women looking for this dress. And the day after the royal wedding a woman called to ask if we could order the wedding dress for her: this lady was not yet engaged so this was a ‘just-in-case’ dress!”
It’s not only fashion that’s a trigger for “behavioural convergence”. A friend was in a quandary over which of three greens to paint her kitchen. One was Farrow & Ball’s Breakfast Room Green, the others ColorTrend’s Lucerne and Paradise Green by Dulux. In the hardware store she went first to the wall of Farrow & Ball, hanging back politely until the well-dressed 60-something couple in front of her had made their selection. So what did they choose? The last can of Breakfast Room Green. In a panic, she accosted a salesperson and demanded he find her another can, Lucerne and Paradise long forgotten. “I think it might have been the woman’s smart silver-blonde hair and very nice handbag that suggested she might have excellent taste?” she explains. “Or it might have been that I may have been about to be told I couldn’t have the paint.”
At the winter sales I overheard a slightly rabid shopper saying how she’d been “stalking” a dress. Her elation rivalled that of a long-distance runner on winning gold.
Yes, the old wanting-what-you-can’t-have argument. Shops are good at implying scarcity, especially at the upper end of the market – “exclusive” and “limited edition” can shift everything from a lipstick to furniture. The waiting lists of the tiger years may be well gone – “You can have the Birkin bag in 2025, madam” – but just look at the queues that gather when a high street store like H&M launches a limited edition designer collection, or ask any sales assistant at a Chanel counter about the urgency women bring to their requests that the newest nail colour be put by for them in advance of the general release. Sometimes the thrill of the chase takes over from the object of lust itself – and if a bag, dress or nail polish is hard to get hold of, the consummation of purchase is all the more satisfying. At the winter sales I overheard a slightly rabid shopper saying how she’d been “stalking” a dress. Her elation rivalled that of a long-distance runner on winning gold. With a feeling like that the end result of her shopping trips, we don’t need to look too hard for a trigger.
Stores have countless ways to seduce us, and the word “reduced” always gives us a shot of adrenaline. “At my local shop, the same wine has been on ‘special offer’ down from €20 to €10 for two years,” explains Lunn. “The first price anchors us – it’s a signal, which we respond to, making us more likely to buy at the discounted price. We get tricked by this stuff.” Equally a designer store might display something priced €1,000 at the front, so that a top costing €120 seems a bargain by comparison. “Sales are all about trying to convince you it used to be worth more,” says Lunn. “No one ever thinks of it from the store’s standpoint: it was half as good as we thought it was and now we need to flog it.” It’s why discount stores are so compelling. When my son was learning to talk he would shout “Granny’s shop!” whenever he saw a TK Maxx bag, my mother had such a serious habit: at one point she was there twice a day, compulsively minesweeping for “bargains”. Now that we no longer experience any shame about shopping in discount stores, picking up yellow-stickered grocery items or buying our body weight in cheap loo roll, our homes are at risk of bursting at the seams with “good buys”. Never mind. That French armoire on the Laura Ashley website would be the perfect spot to store the overflow. And there’s free delivery until the end of the month.
The store does its bit, flagging up the supposed “good value”: your own imagination does the rest, grafting onto the purchase a promise of briskly efficient good housekeeping which may or may not actually transpire.
Even humble food shopping can leave us in a weak and vulnerable state unsure of what constitutes a good buy. Why buy two packets of organic mince when you can have three for just a little bit more money? Never mind that the third will languish in the freezer for months: at the moment of purchase you are seeing in your mind’s eye a neat shepherd’s pie nestling beside the frozen peas, just waiting to be conveniently sprung for that midweek dinner. The store does its bit, flagging up the supposed “good value”: your own imagination does the rest, grafting onto the purchase a promise of briskly efficient good housekeeping which may or may not actually transpire. (You may be too busy trawling Net-A-Porter for a dress to make a shepherd’s pie.) Marks & Spencer’s phenomenally successful Dine in For Two deal has made gourmands of us all, with one retired couple complaining that they felt a distinct thickening of the waistlines “from all those delicious puddings and wine”.
Even far away from the store, physically removed from many of the traditional triggers, we are not safe. Websites have their own clever ways to push our buttons: the Outnet, for example, flags items with “Only one left!” to heighten the urgency, while others have timers, or let you know that “ten other people are looking at this item”. Browsing becomes riddled with anxiety and we feel urgently compelled to click and purchase, before that other nicely dressed woman in who-knows-where gets there first. A leisurely online browse for some books turns into an exercise in self-regard, with Amazon suggesting that “people who bought this, also bought … ”. You are a member of a certain intellectual club, and buying more books of the same ilk will only reinforce this feeling.
A leisurely online browse for some books turns into an exercise in self-regard, with Amazon suggesting that “people who bought this, also bought … ”. You are a member of a certain intellectual club.
But surely in recent times we’ve become wiser, comparing prices online and holding back from scattergun spending? “Not at all,” says Philip Graves flatly. “We’re just not able to become cannier. When we’re shopping we’re largely feeding desire rather than need.” Pete Lunn agrees: “Ultimately, it’s almost impossible to avoid falling for marketing strategies, such as price anchoring. Since we are bad at making judgments we have to use shortcuts, and these signals are so persuasive. We have no choice.”
Image by Jason Lloyd Evans
Sarah Halliwell
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our May issue, out Thursday May 5.
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