Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [44]
BUT SUPERSTITIONS AND rituals can take forms that go beyond how we eat an Oreo or pour a cocktail. There are many other ways we often can behave irrationally when it comes to products. When I was around five years old, I contracted an extremely bizarre disease known as Schonlein-Henochs, an allergic reaction that typically follows a respiratory tract infection, symptoms of which include internal bleeding and kidney inflammation. I turned as red as a Christmas stocking.
For more than a month, I was confined to a hospital bed in a sound-isolated room. It was painful to move. I couldn’t bear even the slightest noise, as it hurt my ears. I was extremely sick for two years. When the disease finally went away, my doctors still wouldn’t let me play any contact sports. So I would have something to do while everybody else my age was outside playing football, my parents gave me a box of Legos.
Bad move. It was the beginning of a decade-long love affair.
I’m persistent and obsessive by nature, and from that day on, I began collecting boxful after boxful of Legos. They became my life. I stowed my collection in a drawer under the lower mattress of my bunk bed, though usually hundreds of Legos were strewn all over my bedroom floor. A year later, I entered my first big construction—a replica of a Scandinavian ferryboat—in a local Lego competition. Once the Lego jury proved that I’d built the thing without any help from my parents (they rather sadistically destroyed the boat and made me rebuild it), I was awarded first prize.
Which was—guess what—another big box of Legos. Energized by my success, I came up with the idea of constructing my own version of Legoland. Colonizing my parents’ backyard, I built canals, bridges, a boat, a castle, and even a complicated sensor system. I traveled to Sweden to get a special kind of grainy rock and a special brand of foam for my mountains. I bought my own custom-made engine to power the canal system—there was even a mini-landscape of bonsai trees. (I was eleven at the time—what can I say?)
Finally, I opened up my Legoland in my parents’ backyard, with pathways around it for spectators. When no one showed up, I was heartbroken. So I placed an ad in the local paper, and this time 131 people came—including two lawyers from Lego, who informed me very politely that if I persisted in using the name Legoland, I’d be guilty of trademark infringement. In the end, after lots of back and forth, I ended up renaming my version Mini-Land. (A few years later, I found myself working for the Lego company, but that’s another story.)
The point is I know a little something about collecting, and a lot about obsession with a brand. And in many ways, brand obsession has a lot in common with rituals and superstitious behavior—both involve habitual, repeated actions that have little or no logical basis, and both stem from the need for a sense of control in an overwhelming and complex world.
As a society bred from hunters and gatherers, we’re all hardwired to accumulate, though these days, collecting has reached extreme levels. A 1981 New York Times article, “Living with Collections,” estimated that approximately 30 percent of Americans tend to hoard—and their number is growing, thanks largely to the secondary markets that the Internet has created. In 1995, the same year eBay opened up their site, sales in the collectibles industry reached $8.2 billion. Currently there are 49 million users—many of them collectors—registered on the eBay Web site.
In ancient times, collecting was the exclusive province of the rich, but nowadays, people of all income levels accumulate everything from Barbie dolls and Happy Meal toys to Coke bottles and Campbell’s Soup cans, to sneakers and Fillmore West posters. To take an extreme example, today