For large numbers of people in wealthy countries around the world, shopping in clothing stores has become a popular pastime, an enjoyable and powerfully addictive activity, just like social media. Both on the street and on the Internet, cheap clothing stores have proliferated where you can make quick and affordable purchases to the majority of pockets..
Contents
Various studies have shown that the brain finds pleasure in the search for cheap things, which we tend to buy just for the simple fact of being well priced, even though we don't need them and we weren't even looking for them at the time..
This dynamic has significant consequences. Consumers run the risk of being trapped in a hedonistic routine in which the continual search for new things leaves them unhappy and dissatisfied. For most, breaking this cycle is not that easy, it is not like simply committing not to buy anything. That is why it is no coincidence that shopping has become such an absorbing and compulsive activity: The reasons are in our neurology, the economy, culture and technology.
When we look at a new item, the first thing we look at is the price of that item, weighing it. The medial prefrontal cortex considers the decision to make, since the insula, which processes pain, reacts with the economic cost. Then the brain decides whether to buy the product or not, starting a hedonic competition between the immediate pleasure of purchasing and the immediate pain of paying. And it is that our mentality is in line with the evidence that we obtain happiness in buying and obtaining new things, with the feeling of wanting something.
While pleasure is activated only from the act of looking, we must bear in mind that we also obtain pleasure in the act of buying, or more specifically, in getting a bargain. The medial prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that does the cost-benefit analysis. It is sensitive not only to the price, but to how much we might like the product. But that the comparison of the two: how much I like it and what they charge me for it, is what is called "transactional profit," says Tom Meyvis, professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University and expert in consumer psychology. "This looks a lot with clothes," he says. "Part of the joy you get from shopping is not just that you've bought something that you really like and are going to wear, but also that you get a good result."
Shopping is a complex process, neurologically speaking. In 2007, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon studied the brains of various test subjects using Functional Magnetic Resonance while making clothing purchase decisions. The researchers found that when one of the study subjects was presented with a desirable item for sale, the pleasure center, or nucleus acumbens, in their brain lit up. In addition, the more the person wanted that garment, the greater activity was detected in the Functional Magnetic Resonance.
If just seeing desirable items and thinking about getting a bargain generates waves of joy thinking about your purchase, it is clear that you could not design a more pleasant consumer culture than the modern one, that of cheap consumption and rapid transition.
As we can see, fast fashion perfectly feeds this neurological process. First of all, clothes are very cheap, increasingly, which makes it easy to buy. Second, new store marketing releases are very effective, which means that customers always have something new to see and something to be desired. Famous stores like Zara, which "design" and ship two new clothing shipments each week, are notorious for knocking out high-end designers, allowing the customer to get something similar to the original at a small fraction of the cost, priced notably lower than the rest of the market, so their products are perceived as a bargain.
So it is not surprising that fast fashion brands such as Zara or H & M, report sales record sales year after year..
Tempting price tags on trendy clothing and accessories for affordable impulse purchases are too “good” to resist.
Zara is successful because it is the best in a rapidly named market segment. Look at the name of this market segment. QUICK.
Still, the only way to turn the sale of cheap clothing into a truly lucrative business is to sell a large quantity. That's exactly what fast fashion has been doing, and making huge profits in the process. Zara founder Amancio Ortega is recognized by Forbes magazine as the "richest retailer in the world." For his part, the richest person in Sweden is Stefan Persson, president of H & M. And his companies continue to grow ...
Yet No Comments