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The Dopamine - Impulse Buy link
cogno64 writes "Certain stimuli in the brain, such as the smell of freshly based cookies, lead to higher levels of dopamine that remain after the stimulus is removed, leading to altered behavior through interaction with learning, memory, and executive function. The experiencer is more likely to make a purchase decision based on their heightened dopamine levels, with significant impact for internet marketers.
According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting today, the neurotransmitter dopamine continues to be released for nearly an hour after neurons are stimulated, suggesting the existence of secondary mechanisms that allow for sustained availability of dopamine in different regions of the brain including areas critical for memory consolidation, drug induced plasticity and maintaining active networks during working memory.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with learning and memory, motor control, reward perception and executive functions such as working memory, behavioral flexibility and decision making. When a novel or salient stimulus occurs, the dopamine neurons in the brain increase their firing rate, boosting the release of dopamine. The dopamine is diffused into the extracellular space of the brain until it can be transported or metabolized."
Now if they could only come up with a product that resulted in increased serotonin levels, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!
(Serotonin is involved in depression and anxiety disorders.)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
IANAD but they're all called "seratonin uptake inhibitors" and the gist is they stop your brain from reabsorbing seratonin and therefore increasing the constant level found in your brain.
If you want to get really wacky, you can take MDMA (ecstasy) and have ALL of your seratonin flood into the brain at once, getting tracers, a "bulletproof" feeling, and (to quote Ali G) the desire to dance like a prick.
Finally, a more reliable way to increase your seratonin levels is through eating right and daily exercise. I'd lean much more heavily on this method rather than any sort of drug for this, as messing with the brain directly is a bit. . . ponderous. Lots of side effects from Paxil/Prozac/et al and they're ALL addictive. Even when they say they're not. Paxil claimed to be non-addictive for a while, and it was on the market for over 2 years before the drugco went "oops, looks like it is addictive! Our bad! But look at its profitability!"
Legalized drug dealers, indeed.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
This is actually key - and not just subversive marketing but marketing in general. My own mental habit when watching television - and this is automatic; I couldn't *stop* thinking this way - is to sort of "remote view" the conversations in the advertising agency, and then reduce the commercial down to its essential elements:
"Lifestyle. If I don't own this, I'm not cool."
"Buy this and it will get me laid." (I salute the various body spray ads using this technique so nakedly, it was probably considered risky when first proposed - it's one thing to subtly add sexual imagery to commercials - it's another to just make a naked claim that a product will get you laid. And it's worked. Which says very little for the modern 18-24 year old male, frankly.)
Then I picture the imagery the agency decides on, the song choice, and how it was conceived, laboratory style, to try to manipulate me.
I apply the same mental circuits to religion, ideology, and so on.
When this mental process becomes automatic, the desire to consume drops significantly because it generally makes me feel somewhat insulted - the usually cheap, manipulative nature of advertising and so on. Even great advertising is pretty bad if you break it down to its calculated, constituent parts.
As Rosco P. Coltrane (how's Flash doing btw?) mentions, it's increasingly necessary to be aware of these things whenever you expose yourself to any kind of retail environment, for the reasons he lists.
Lastly, avoid retail environments altogether unless you specifically want to buy a certain product.
It's hard for me to get wound up about consumer culture because it really requires only a few easily-learned habits to innoculate yourself against it. Like anyone else, I buy products, but I research, especially higher-end items, to the point of analysis paralysis, before putting my money down. I take a shopping list with me to the supermarket.
Sheriff Little of Chickasaw county agrees, btw.
The smell of bread or cookies or whatever, will probably initially cause this thought: "mmmm cookies."
The immediate second thought should be, "How cheap and insulting."
After hammering me with loud TV and radio ads, assaulting my eyeballs with garish print and web ads, flooding my inbox with email ads, and littering the landscape with signs and billboards, the marketers have come up with another to try to make me buy crap I don't want. I'm pretty good at resisting, but damn I get tired of this crap in my face all day long. Just go away, dammit! :-)
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