Think about the last thing you bought. Perhaps it was something you needed, like groceries for dinner. Or something you wanted, like that impressive new smartphone, or something that’s gone viral on social media that you didn’t even know you needed but now suddenly want because everyone else in your feed has posted about it.
Whatever it was, you probably had a perfectly reasonable explanation for buying it. But was that explanation entirely yours, or did someone, or something else, influence your decision?
We’re constantly being influenced by all kinds of psychological forces every day. Many of which big brands know exactly how to exploit, with one goal in mind: getting us to buy now and think later.
Why we buy what we buy
We like to believe we’re rational shoppers, carefully weighing up what we need against what we can afford. Yet our brains are remarkably good at making irrational decisions, particularly when faced with more information and choices than we can comfortably process.
For example, consider the chaos that the Black Friday shopping event brings every year. We’re frantically browsing online and being bombarded with options when we see an exciting, time-limited promotional offer. Faced with a decision that suddenly feels urgent, we convince ourselves that we’re saving money by taking advantage of the deal. Yet, in the rush to decide, we may fail to calculate just how much we’re saving or even consider if we’re buying the thing we needed in the first place. We bought it just to avoid the pain of missing out or got swept up in the excitement of the deal.
Upgrading to a large coffee to go suddenly seems like excellent value when we realise it costs only a little more than the medium. Why wouldn’t you pay a little more to get so much extra? But we’ve become so focused on the apparent bargain that we’ve failed to consider just how expensive the coffee was in the first place, or whether we can even physically drink that much. Chances are that the contents will go cold before we are able to finish it, wasting both coffee and money.
Our physical bodies can also be influenced to get us to buy more, like our emotions or senses. For example, we often look to what everyone else is buying when in a state of panic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing others stockpile toilet paper could make us worry that there wouldn’t be enough left for ourselves. No one stopped to question how toilet paper would keep us safe from the virus, but that wasn’t the point. Buying more than we needed influenced a sense of being in control at a time when society was locking down and our everyday freedoms were being restricted.
When it comes to influencing our senses, the smell of freshly baked bread or cookies drifting from the in-store bakeries in a supermarket can make us feel hungry, and a hungry shopper is a more impulsive one. Alternatively, slow-tempo music playing through the overhead speakers can subtly encourage us to move at a more leisurely pace around the store, increasing the time spent browsing all those products we didn’t need but suddenly want now that we’ve seen them.
Then there are other people. Friends or even complete strangers on social media can influence us to buy the latest thing that’s suddenly gone viral. Something as ordinary as a reusable tumbler can become a must-have product simply because everybody else seems to have one. We might not even need it, but owning one helps us feel part of the popular crowd.
We might believe we’re choosing entirely for ourselves, but by the time we reach the checkout, an awful lot has already influenced what ends up in our shopping cart.
Who is really making the decisions?
None of this means that we’re helpless consumers at the mercy of marketers when wandering around grocery stores or scrolling online during the dead of night.
We still have preferences, exercise judgment and ultimately decide whether or not to buy something. Nor is every influence necessarily harmful. A recommendation from a trusted friend might lead us to discover something perfect, or an eye-catching display might draw our attention to a genuinely better or cheaper product.
We can be influenced without being aware of it, but we can also recognise an influencing attempt and decide that we’re perfectly happy to act on it. The more difficult question is whether we would have made the same decision if those influences hadn’t been there at all.
Would we still have bought that large coffee if the medium hadn’t been priced so closely to it? Would we have bought all that toilet paper if we didn’t see news reports of empty shelves and people bulk buying? Would the tumbler have seemed quite so appealing if we hadn’t seen social media influencers telling us it was the next must-have thing?
The science of why we buy
These questions are at the heart of my new book, Influenced: The Science of Why We Buy.
There are so many strange and wonderful psychological forces that shape our purchasing decisions, from the mental shortcuts we rely on to make quick decisions to the influence of our emotions, our senses and the people we see online. All of this helps explain why we buy the things we do, like those purchases that seem perfectly sensible at the time but rather less so when we get home.
Perhaps we’ll never be completely uninfluenced. After all, our decisions don’t happen in isolation from the world around us. But understanding what shapes our choices give us an opportunity to question them and perhaps think a little more carefully before we reach for our wallets.
Ultimately, we may be the ones doing the shopping. That doesn’t mean we’re making every decision entirely on our own.