Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [45]
Less extreme cases of brand obsession typically take root in adolescence and even earlier. If children experience social difficulties in school, studies have shown they’re far more likely to become preoccupied with collecting. Collecting something—whether it’s coins, stamps, leaves, Pokémon cards, or Beanie Babies—gives children a sense of mastery, completion, and control, while at the same time raising their self-esteem, elevating their status, and just maybe even compensating for earlier years of social difficulty.
Point is, there’s something about the ritual-like act of collecting that makes us feel safe and secure. When we are stressed out, or when life feels random and out-of-control, we often seek out comfort in familiar products or objects. We want to have solid, consistent patterns in our lives, and in our brands. So, even though our rational brains tell us it’s completely irrational and illogical to own 547 Hello Kitty fridge magnets, we buy them anyway, because the collecting ritual makes us feel somehow more in control of our lives.16
ONE THING IS clear. Ritual and superstition can exert a potent influence on how and what we buy. And after years of studying product rituals and their effect on branding, it struck me: might religion—which is so steeped in familiar and comforting rituals of its own—play a role in why we buy as well?
In my next experiment, I set out to discover what connection, if any, exists between religion and our buying behavior. Are there similarities between the way our brains react to religious and spiritual symbols, and the way they react to products or brands? Would certain brands provoke the same kind of emotions in us or inspire the same sense of devotion and loyalty provoked by religion? I wasn’t trying to downplay the importance of religion in people’s lives, but I was pretty sure there was something here.
Turns out I was right.
6
I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER
Faith, Religion, and Brands
ONE BY ONE, OVER THE course of several days, the nuns filed into the laboratory, smoothed out their black and white habits, and made themselves as comfortable as possible on the fMRI’s examination table. Ranging in age from twenty-three to sixty-four, the fifteen women participating in this 2006 study were members of the cloistered Carmelite order, an austere Roman Catholic sect of monastics whose roots go back to medieval times.
Overseen by Dr. Mario Beauregard and Dr. Vincent Paquette, two neuroscientists at the University of Montreal, Canada, the “nun study” wasn’t carried out to further any religious agenda or to prove or disprove the existence of God. It was simply to use neuroimaging to find out more about how the brain experiences religious feelings or beliefs. Beauregard and Paquette were attempting to uncover the answer to a complex question: what parts of our brains light up when we’re engaging in private, spiritual experiences, such as prayer, or when we’re experiencing the sensation that we’re close to God?
The scientists began by asking the fifteen nuns to relive the most profound religious experience they’d had as members of the Carmelite order.1 Unsurprisingly, the scans revealed that when reliving those experiences, the nuns exhibited a flurry of neural activity in their caudate nucleus, a small, central brain region that produces feelings of joy, serenity, self-awareness, and even love. Another activated area was the insula, which the scientists theorized relates to