All Consuming: How Stores Scan You, Suck You in and Make You Spend More

[Viva_La_Revolution]

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Lindstrom first became aware of what’s called “priming” while conducting research in Asia -- Korea, specifically. He focused on one of that nation’s biggest shopping mall chains, which was particularly popular with pregnant women and young mothers. Why? A few years ago, this mall, while trying to keep their shoppers in stores longer, began pumping in smells and sounds that pregnant women might find soothing -- everything from Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder to the aroma of cherries to music that these women themselves would have heard in utero. (Science has since determined that fetuses as young as six months are sensitive and receptive to outside stimuli.)

At that point, it was really just an experiment: “Marketers don’t know” everything about human behavior, he says. “They have hunches.”

To Lindstrom’s shock and distress, not only did these tactics work on expectant mothers; once the women returned to the mall with their newborns, the babies would stop fussing. “I interviewed the moms,” Lindstrom says. “And they all said, ‘I feel so relaxed here, and my baby is so calmed.’ ”

Diaper companies and formula manufacturers dispensing their products to new moms in maternity wards seems a transparent, almost noble marketing technique in comparison. What’s happening in Korea is so stealth it’s verging on Huxley-esque science fiction: the careful cultivation of an in-utero consumer, primed to have product preferences before even speech develops.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/all_UpOxVI0fL4OANQb7mlaGoO/1

on edit: this is a very small snip of a 4 page article. I humbly request ya'll read the whole thing

[Demeter]

1. What is wrong with making shopping a pleasant experience for mother and child?

I'd shop there, too. Instead of fighting through surly crowds and ghastly background music that is the modern marketing experience, I'd love to be soothed and comfortable.

People who don't have sales resistance shouldn't do the shopping anyway. Grow a spine, people!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. There's nothing wrong with it...

Until they try to sell you something dangerous, or wrong for your baby...

It has nothing to do with growing a spine.

It's really about understanding what the marketing people are trying to do to you.

They're really not benevolent.

[Demeter]

4. I'm not that ignorant. Most people aren't

Marketing people can do their damnedest. But they can't force a choice unless all other choices are eliminated...as in Presidential primaries.

[MADem]

6. I agree. No one can "force" you to buy shit.

I prefer a supermarket with natural lighting to one with that garish crap. All things being equal, I'd take the nice environment over the crappy one when I HAVE to shop.

I don't buy stuff willy-nilly, anyway, anymore. After a while you realize you just don't need all kinds of crapola cluttering up your life.

[demigoddess]

7. except it becomes like a drug. That's the only thing wrong

and the withdrawal pains are not recognizable as such.

[GreenStormCloud]

2. So you would prefer they pump in skunk smell instead?

Then you would complain about that. You are just looking for something to gripe about.

[KarenS]

5. Yikes,,,, I'll finish this article tomorrow,,,,

but this is scary, sick and sad all rolled into one.

Thanks for posting!!

[Stuart G]

8. k & r

[hobbit709]

9. Just like when they rearrange the shelves in a grocery store.

so they can get you to impulse buy something while you're trying to find what you were looking for. Most people don't realize this. I do and at times it has pissed me off enough to walk out and go to a different grocery.