So – here are some news that you already new. This blog led me do this article that told me that we base our experience not only on our senses, but on our interpretation of what our senses have registred. Are you surprised?
I hope not, because without our interpretational capabilities sound would only be wave-formations of compressed air, touch would only be reactive force and light… well we don’t really know what light is.
Of course our interpretational frame matters. Question is what affects that frame. To me it’s obvious that it’s a combination of experience (associations specifically) and probably, to some small extent, our genetic inheritance.
Experience has taught us what makes us feel good, valuable, desired, relaxed, etc. And that’s what triggers us to buy and enjoy something at a later point in time. We can’t always distinguish between if the product triggered our enjoyment or if something else that we associated with the product did. And that’s where advertising and design comes into play. We advertise to create associations and we design to bring them back, and more importantly, to bring back other associations from our past and our genetic heritage.
(So, in reading the linked articles above, is the price part of the design? Well – do you associate high price with high value? I guess so.)
My mantra, as always: You don’t buy products, you buy into a set of associations.
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