Selected Highlights at Lee Eisenberg

Marketing textbooks say that buying is a simple, six-step process, but it isn’t: much of what we buy we don’t buy rationally. Shoptimism explores the various motivations that lie behind the myriad choices we make.
Numerous studies that shed light on the dynamics of how, where, when, and why and what we buy. These range from inquiries into store “atmospherics” (color, smell, music, what salespeople are wearing), to grand “unified Buy theories” that try to explain buying in terms of status-seeking, or therapeutic relief, or the role our parents play in shaping tastes and values.
We are living, and will continue to live, in what many deem to be the “Age of Cheap,” meaning that private labels are the wave of the future and well-known brands – from Listerine to Ralph Lauren — are at risk.
Demographic and psychographic research dominate Sell Side thinking. The latter owes a debt to one of the most influential figures in 20th century American psychology, Abraham Maslow, whose celebrated “Pyramid of Needs’ has been hijacked by the Sell Side and turned into a key marketing resource.
Neuroscience and behavioral economics are two academic fields being used extensively to figure out what makes the consumer tick. Many of these studies explore how the brain registers “the pain of paying.”
The case against buying, i.e., anti-consumerism, boils down to an argument about what people say they “need” versus what they merely “want.” The problem is, it’s often very hard to know the difference.
“Brands”– are they, as marketing gurus contend, reflections of our personal identities or, as anti-consumerists counter, little more than “slick lies”?
Most of us fall into one of two categories: Classic or Romantic buyers. Classic buyers are rational, practical, and attracted to value and quality. Romantic buyers are driven by desire, a love of novelty, a desire to be cool or cutting edge.
Retailers deploy numerous pricing schemes to win the hearts and minds of buyers. Many of these pricing schemes have to do with how marketers are able to set “anchor prices” in our brain, then jiggle the anchors to make us believe we’re getting a good deal.
The old canard, “Women shop, men buy” is certainly debatable. To illustrate, the book invites readers to take a brief self-test that addresses the degree to which each of us displays both feminine and masculine gender characteristics, which may in turn influence how and what we buy.
The book’s Afterword is devoted to “gifting”: why and what we give to others, why and what we give to ourselves. It then defines the “perfect gift.” Hint: not a gift card.