Brain on Money

Your Brain on Money

[email protected] @harlemhomeboy

Your imagina+on and you…. ;)

Check the following lists:

No+ce anything?

Product Air Tap Water Rice Sugar Gasoline ( regular unleaded) Can of Soda Apples House (typical suburban) Television (SONY HDTV) Car ( Toyota Camry LE) Fitness machine ( ellip+cal) Wine (decent Shiraz) Pet Dog (border collie) Chair (Levenger) Coffee ( Starbucks beans) Beef ( sirloin steak)

US retail (ca.2008) per pound net weight

Free 0.0000633

0.29 0.34 0.7 0.8 1.6 2 6 7 7.5 9 10 11.7 12 12

Product Book (hardback) Bicycle (Fuji) Luxury Car ( Lexus LS 660) Blue Jeans ( Levi’s) Chain Saw (Husquvarna) Human Blood Combat knife ( Ka-‐Bar) Watch ( Timex) Laptop Computer ( Dell) Silver bullion Telescope ( TEC) Bra ( Victoria’s secret) Handgun ( Glock) Pivate Jet( Lear Jet) Music CD Perfume ( Samsara)


12.5 17 20 22 37 45 103 167 204 225 238 240 440 460 480 930

Product Ipod Classic ( w/o songs) Fake Columbia U. Diploma Cell Phone ( Motorola) Porn DVD Breast Implants Lips+ck ( MAC) Marijuana $ 20 bills ( currency) Luxury Watch ( Rolex) Fake Diamonds ( Zirconia) Gold bullion Human kidney ( black market) Cocaine Human semen ( from donor) Viagra Prozac


980 1,090 1,390 1,510 1,930 2,600 4,900 9,100 10,100 13,600 14,000 16,200 36,200 52,900 53,000 63,000

Product Heroin Ecstasy Ipod Classic ( full songs) Botox Injec+on Real Columbia U. Diploma Real Diamonds Van Gogh pain+ng LSD ( pure liquid) Human egg ( from donor)


68,000 75,600 106,700 141,600

1.25 million 15 million 28 million 30 million 4.5 trillion

Source: Geoffrey Miller, Spent, 2009 Loved the book!

Pleasure is profitable!

Your Brain on Money •  Consumerism: –  “The conscious and intelligent manipula+on of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democra+c society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society cons+tute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country….”

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928 Consultant to P&G, Car+er, GE, and helped United Fruit Company (Chiquita) overthrow the Government of Guatemala

Your Brain on Money

•  Consumers are said to never be fully sa+sfied with their purchases. Dreaming of owning the appears to be more pleasurable than owning Campbell 1987

•  Desire equals specific wishes inflamed by imagina+on, fantasy and longing for transcendent pleasure. Belk et al.

•  It is the symbolic value of objects which we desire and what they represent about us. Belk 2003

Your Brain on Money

•  Psychoanalysis suggests that we try and sa+sfy our emo+onal desires through consump+on

•  Desire is interwoven with daydreaming, and a consump+on dream is the mental representa+on of objects that consumers desire and or experiences they would like to realize. These daydreams intensify desire.

What Fuels Desire

•  We do not so much seek sa+sfac+on from products, as pleasure from the illusory experiences which they construct from their associated meanings Campbell 1987

•  Desire is created by goods ac+ng as bridges between would-‐be buyers and displaced meaning. Once the bridge is acquired, this threatens the displaced meaning leading to desire for another object. McCracken 1988

What Fuels Desire

•  To desire is to be alive. It is to hope and to imagine. The imagery of objects is co-‐shaped both by marketers and our own consumer ideologies. Therefore our behavior is perhaps berer characterized as not just the pursuit of desired objects, but the pursuit of desire itself Belk 2003

No. 1

•  “one is that above average products can compensate for below-‐average traits when one is trying to build serious, long term rela+onships..”

No. 2

•  The other idea “that consumerism promotes is that products offer cooler, more impressive ways to display our desirable traits than any natural behavior could provide.” Really?

Uhhh….are you sure about that?

Your Brain on Money •  Narcissism –  Selfishness – Arrogance –  Excep+onalism –  Sense of en+tlement – Admira+on seeking –  Success fantasizing – Grandiosity –  Vic+m mentality –  Emo+onal instability

Source: Diagnos+c and Sta+s+cal Manual of Mental Disorders (Again, love this book!)

The Fundamental Delusion: Selling the Dream

•  WILL influence people: size, shape, age, sex, race, familiarity, relatedness, arrac+veness

•  Will NOT influence people: People will not actually no+ce and care about the products we buy and display…. – Can you remember anything specific about what your boy/girlfriend wore yesterday? Your boss’s watch? The face of the last Ferrari driver you saw?

Selling the Dream •  “Fe+shiza+on” of youth and disregard for age and wisdom

•  Material clues viewed as more relevant / accurate than perspec+ve gained through first impressions (experience)

•  Provide material signals of Fitness as the anthropologists would say

Conspicuous Consump+on

•  Luxury goods are acquired mainly to display wealth, not to increase happiness

•  High price is a benefit, not a cost •  High price guarantees the product’s reliability as an indicator of the possessors wealth and taste

Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899

Conspicuous Consump+on

•  Conspicuous Waste

•  Conspicuous Precision (my preciousss….)

•  Conspicuous Reputa+on

$2,755,000

SWEET DREAMS, MY NEW BFF! ;)

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Brain on Money