Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [42]
Or what about the ritual of the Olympic flame, which runners transport around the world in the globe’s largest relay race (though, in fact, the Olympic flame is a ritual that began not thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece, as many people believe, but at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)? If you think about it, the Olympic Games would be next to nothing if you took away its rituals. Imagine, no opening and closing ceremonies, no presentation of the winners’ medals after each contest, no stirring national anthems. What in the world would be left? In fact, most of what we enjoy in the world of sports and entertainment today wouldn’t be the same without the rituals.
BUT WHAT DO rituals have to do with what we think about when we buy? A lot. For one thing, products and brands that have rituals or superstitions associated with them are much “stickier” than those that don’t. In an unsettled, fast-moving world, we’re all searching for stability and familiarity, and product rituals give us an illusion of comfort and belonging. Isn’t there a sense of security in being part of, say, the Apple community or the Netflix community—in knowing that there are millions of other people out there who listen to their iPods every morning on the train or who cue up a new list of movies every Friday night, just like you do?
In an increasingly standardized, sterilized, homogenous world (how many malls have you visited with the exact same stores—a Staples, a Gap, a Best Buy, a Chili’s, and a Banana Republic? Too many, I’ll bet), rituals help us differentiate one brand from another. And once we find a ritual or brand we like, isn’t there a lot of comfort in having a particular blend of coffee to brew every morning, a signature shampoo with a familiar smell, or a favorite make of running sneaker we buy year after year? I’d even venture to say that there is something so appealing about this sense of stability and familiarity that a lot of consumers have almost a religious sense of loyalty to their favorite brands and products.
Indeed, buying a product is more often a ritualized behavior than a conscious decision. Take skin creams. Do those antiwrinkle, smile-line-eliminating, crows’-feet-exiling potions that beckon to every woman (and more and more men) from the drugstore shelves actually work? Many female consumers I’ve observed over the years admit that antiwrinkle creams are pointless, but every three months, they’ll still clamber to the local pharmacy to pick up the latest miracle balm, the one with the newest, sexiest, most complex-sounding secret formula. It’s a pattern as predictable as the seasons. After a few weeks, they’ll gaze disappointedly into their mirrors, conclude it doesn’t work, and go out to hunt down another magic formula. Why? Simply because it’s a ritual they—and their mothers and grandmothers before them—have always followed.
After all, most of us are creatures of habit. Consider the way we navigate a cell phone. Once we become accustomed to Nokia’s navigational keys, aren’t we loath to change brands to, say, a Sony Ericsson? Who wants to relearn an entirely new system? Consumers who own an Apple iPod are no doubt accustomed to its ritualized navigation; most iPod users could press Music, then Artists, followed by their favorite track in their sleep. Why court confusion by buying an mp3 player made by Phillips or