In the book, I also warn retailers that the buyer psychology pendulum will swing back again. Now research due for publication in next October’s Journal of Consumer Research gives retailers deeper insight into what drives the pendulum. Consumer behavior experts from Arizona State University and Erasmus University in the Netherlands conclude that when people are feeling lonely, they become interested in nostalgia.
In one study, the researchers had participants play a ball-tossing game on a computer. But the game was rigged so that some participants were told they’d been dropped from the game. Compared to the people who were not dropped, those participants were more likely to say that belonging is important to them. And they also made more consumer choices which reminded them of their personal history. This included preferences regarding automobiles, food brands, TV shows, movies, and even shower soap.
At another point in the research, the people who had been dropped from the game were offered a cookie carrying a brand name popular in the person’s past. Those who ate the treat ended up complaining less of loneliness than they did before.
We can’t exclude the possibility here that simply eating the cookie—any brand of cookie as long as it has chocolate in it, of course—would ease the pangs of loneliness. Still, the researchers say their methodology leads them to conclude that the taste of nostalgia was what did the trick.
Have a customer who’s looking lonely? They’re likely to be most interested in brands and items associated with years gone by.
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