Why we buy branded items even if they are not to our liking

Imagine that you don’t like the color green. You have never had a single green item in your closet. But then one day you see a T-shirt with a recognizable crocodile on the chest – and your hand reaches for your credit card purse. Why is that?

entrepreneur and investor

Tells us why we buy branded things, even if they’re not to our taste.

There are at least six reasons that push us to disregard our preferences in order to own an item with a recognizable logo.

The need for belonging

No offense, but we are herd animals. One of our basic needs is to belong to a group of other herd animals, preferably a prestigious and popular one. Buying the latest model of cell phone is like prolonging our membership in a club.

Many people are really ready to eat instant noodles for a month or two to get into it. To ridicule this and in some way censure it is rather silly. The desire to go to the exhibition that everyone is talking about or to read books from the obligatory list of advanced intellectuals is based on the same principle.

Pressure of authority

If the marketing team of a recognized brand has decided that people will wear green this season, it’s pretty hard to change their mind. Marketing rules the world. It dictates its will by all available means.

You see green in shop windows, on advertising banners, on the most “advanced” of your acquaintances and at some point you break down. Perhaps Versace or Gosha Kartsev knows better which color suits everyone and which color suits “losers”.

Ceremony and quality

It’s one thing to carelessly throw a nooneym-shirt into the basket and, after standing in line, pay 1000 rubles. It is quite another to buy a T-shirt for $ 500 in a boutique or showroom. This is a ceremony. You will be seated in a comfortable chair, offered coffee or tea.

The item will be wrapped in pleasantly rustling paper and put in a bag, with which you will proudly walk down Stoleshnikov Lane or Ligovsky Prospekt. To get this little holiday of luxury and complacency, you can ignore the fact that the T-shirt for $ 500 actually do not particularly like you.

In the previous material told about the brands that can still be bought freely available.

Buying a thing that feels good on the body, which does not roll, does not stretch and does not sit after washing, we show respect for ourselves. You can dislike, for example, black suits for fear of funerals and weddings, but it is hard to deny that in the “uniform” from “Brioni” shoulders became wider, waist and pelvis narrower, and somewhere visually disappeared 3-5 extra pounds.

Compensation

Most of us grew up in fairly modest, simple circumstances. In our teenage years, when our fate literally depended on having the right sneakers, we often heard our parents refuse, or even scold us in response to a request for such a gift for a birthday or New Year’s Eve.

Children of the 80s-90s have vivid memories of the markets; of having to stand on cardboard in the freezing cold, waiting for fitting, crowding in pavilions smelling of chemistry and artificial leather and waiting for it to end. Well, the children of the noughties looked at the bright artists in music videos and on the pages of teen magazines and dreamed that someday they too could live in the likeness of a music video – with white teeth, golden hair, tan and embossed belly, emphasized by low-slung jeans.

Buying expensive things is often a gift to that teenager who never got the chance to be cool in time, and if he did, he didn’t “get enough” of the feeling.

Inertia

A large company, as a rule, has a long, interesting, lively history. Actually, it is included in the value of its goods. This history has birth, peak, stagnation, and end. A brand can go through the cycle of births and conditional deaths more than once, and an attentive, critically minded consumer notices them.

And someone, having once identified with a brand, is not able to see that at the moment the favorite is going through a crisis and offers not the best product. Many people remain loyal to the brand they loved twenty years ago more consistently than to their favorite person.

By the way, if you are not ready to give up branded things and simply imported goods, there are ways in which even in a situation of unstable market can get the desired thing. How exactly, you’ll find out at the link below.

The characters who invest year after year in the same Apple and constantly grumble that the company has fallen and never again… Laughing is laughing, but it is really hard to give up the habit. Especially since this or that logo can cause persistent pleasant associations. For example, with the time when a person was young, strong, when he made the first successful deal, bought a dream car and felt: from now on – only forward and upward.

People want what everyone else wants. There is nothing shameful or reprehensible in it, to deny such desires is the real hypocrisy. Shopping is a game and a way to cheer yourself up as well as many others. The main thing is to keep common sense and realize your motives.