The Mind Games of Shopping

The Mind Games of Shopping

The term consumerism is defined as the tendency of people to identify strongly with products they consume, particularly of name brands and status-enhancing appeal. With the marketing world growing larger by day it seems more and more people are attracted to the advertised products and feel the need to have them in order to keep in style with the rest of society. Have you ever wondered why consumers are so drawn to a particular brand or item? Is it the luster or taste? Neuroscientists have begun creating images to attract consumers to a specific product by pushing the "buy button" from peering inside their brains to mold their everyday choices to purchase. "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need"(Chuck Palahniuk). The question at hand is whether marketers can exploit advances in brain science to make more affective commercials and is it ethical for neuroscientists to push the "buy button".

"They are probing the human psyche for the purpose of influencing it" (Blakeslee 200) said Sandra Blaskeslee in If You Have a Buy Button.... The recent experiments in neuromarketing have explored reactions to movie trailers, choices about cars, attraction to a pretty face, gut reactions to political campaign advertising and brand loyalty. In the article the critic Gary Ruskin stresses that consumer groups could trigger consumers' neural activity in many ways to modify their behavior to serve their own means which is where the question of the ethics of neuromarketing comes into place. Are companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi formatting research groups to test the taste buds of consumers or to publicize their product more to convince them to consume more? Dr. Steven Quartz a defender of the studies contradict Mr. Ruskin's idea of neuroscientists using "mind control" by saying " It's pure fantasy to suppose that nueromarketing is about embedding subliminal messages" ( Blaskeslee199). In reality companies see this as a chance to find out what their consumers really think as a great profit opportunity but there is no conclusive evidence that advertising ever causes sales to go up. In Sandra Blakeslee's article she examines the positive economic outcomes neuromarketing has on business but on the other hand she looks at it negatively affected consumers right to decision making and purchases.

In Alice Park's article The Brian: Marketing to Your Mind she also refers to Coke, Pepsi and other beverage and food items as examples to how neuroscientists get into the mind of consumers by making logos like BK "Have it your way" and the McDonald's golden arch. In her article she examines how marketers in the past relied on basic research to find what in fact made consumers press their "buy buttons". Now that the world has become