to make bland one-colour vegetables such as carrots ‘more attractive’, but also pulled out the health card, attempting to convince mothers that fancy slicing was the way to get their children to eat more vegetables. Products such as these, which could never be considered a necessity, mark the crossing of a critical line, the line of needing a new invention for rational reasons including hygiene and safety to you-never-know-when-you-might-need-it reasons devised by advertisers.
When you think that garnishing tools were introduced about ninety years ago, it starts to make more sense how kitchens today became stuffed with items such as ice cream machines, bread makers, mushroom brushes, chocolate fondue fountains, popcorn makers, iced tea brewers and strawberry slicers. Most of us buy these contraptions on impulse, possibly learn how they work, use them once, and spend time trying to find a good place to store them, until we admit that we are never going to make homemade ice cream and spend more time working out how to get rid them. In 2009, an average home in the UK contained twenty-five electrical appliances – an increase of 60 percent in just the last five years alone.9 How did we lose sight of our real needs?
In his essay ‘Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown’, eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot tells the story of how the gift from a friend of a beautiful scarlet dressing gown changed his home. Initially delighted by his gift, Diderot discarded his old gown that he had worn for as long as he could remember. But in a short time, his pleasure turned sour as he began to feel as though the rest of his possessions and surroundings were shabby in comparison with the new gown. One by one he replaced the familiar but well-worn furnishings of his study. He replaced his old chair, for example, with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather. And the rickety old desk? That was out, too. In came an expensive new writing table. Even the beloved prints that had hung on his walls for years were taken down to make way for newer, more costly prints that matched the elegance of the new robe. ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,’ Diderot wrote, ‘but I have become a slave to my new one.’10
Today, consumer researchers call this kind of trading up the Diderot Effect. In the way that Diderot’s new smart gown had the unexpected effect of ‘forcing everything else to conform to its elegant tone’, we have been persuaded ever since the 1920s that we need complementary groups of possessions (colour, style or the up-to-dateness of an item). Ralph Lauren will take over an entire floor of Bloomingdale’s to market a self-contained universe to convince us of the need for a ‘total home environment’. Shoppers can purchase matching Ralph Lauren wallpaper, glasses, sheets, rugs, slippers and, yes, even a dressing gown.11 Similarly, when women were exposed to an advertisement in Good Housekeeping or Ladies’ Home Journal for, say, a Swan electric kettle, in the background was the ‘ideal’ kitchen with the perfect housewife surrounded by her Swan electric toaster, fridge, dishwasher and so on. It was not about buying the kettle per se, but about aspiring to the complete lifestyle conveyed in the picture.
There is a line in the 1999 Oscar-winning film American Beauty when the main character Lester (played by Kevin Spacey) starts to rebel against his cookie-cutter life. In a voice-over, he mocks his wife Carolyn’s materialism. Carolyn works in her manicured rose garden. She is put together in a matching outfit. Lester remarks, ‘That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on the pruning sheers matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident.’
This materialistic image of what life should be started to be embodied everywhere – films, radio, magazines, political speeches, advertising – and all was wrapped up in the famous idea of the American dream. The concept of the American dream, and the image of the perfect suburban home that went with it, became such an inherent part of the fabric of American culture and even a global advertisement to the rest of the world on the way to live that it became un-American to challenge it. Douglas Rushkoff comments in Life Inc., ‘It was less important for this life to provide actual satisfaction as for it to produce a class of people who behaved as if they were satisfied.’12 This desire created a relentless pressure to buy more stuff. Now the barrier that companies needed to overcome was giving people an easy way to pay for it.
Buy Now, Pay Later
Richard Feinberg, a consumer psychology professor at Purdue University and a pioneer in consumer behavioural economics, has long studied the influence of credit cards on our spending decisions. One of the first experiments he conducted, with the help of a local restaurant, involved recording the size of the bill, the size of the tip, and the method of payment – cash or credit card – for 135 customers. He found that people who paid by credit card left tips 2 percent higher than those who paid by cash.
To make sure this was not simply a case of credit card customers being wealthier than cash customers (or company expense-account diners), Feinberg followed up with a controlled experiment in a laboratory. He randomly assigned one group of undergraduate students to a lab with MasterCard signs and logos intentionally placed in the corner. He told the subjects this paraphernalia was for another experiment and to pay no attention to it. A second control group had no credit card-related materials. He showed both sets of participants identical pictures of various products, such as a dress, a tent and a typewriter. For each item he asked, ‘How much would you be willing to pay for it?’ Remarkably, Feinberg’s participants exposed to the red and yellow logo (even though they were told to ignore it) were willing to pay up to three times more for products relative to the control group. The study showed that mere image exposure to a credit card logo is sufficient to affect what people will pay. Feinberg also discovered that students answered the questions faster in the ‘MasterCard’ group room, an indicator that people think less or at least for shorter moments when they spend with plastic.13
Feinberg’s experiments, as revealing as they were, didn’t involve people making decisions about actual purchases. To follow up, MIT economists Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester conducted a study in 2001 based on real bids for real commodities (the study was later appropriately named Always Leave Home Without It).14 MBA students from MIT participated in two real auctions, one for a pair of tickets to a Boston Celtics game, and the other for tickets to a Boston Red Sox game. The Celtics tickets were not just any tickets, mind you; they were for the last regular-season game with the Miami Heat, a game the Celtics had to win to clinch the division title. Tickets had been sold out well in advance and could be bought only from touts. The Red Sox tickets were for a regular-season baseball game with the Toronto Blue Jays.15
The students who volunteered for the experiment reported to a classroom at lunchtime and were handed a sheet of paper that described the prizes and gave instructions on how to record their bids. No information on market values for any of the prizes was given, but descriptions read like this: ‘One pair of 3rd row balcony tickets for Celtics-Miami game, Sunday April 19’. The students were told not to discuss their answers or anything else about the bid sheet. Unbeknownst to the participants, two different versions were handed out at random. Half the sheets stated that payment was required by winners in cash, the ‘cash condition’ sheet. It included a note that they had to indicate whether they had ‘ready access to a local cash machine’. The other sheet stipulated that payment must be with a credit card.
The results were clear. Students who agreed to pay with cash bid an average of $28.51 for the Celtics ticket, but the students who agreed to pay with plastic bid an average of $60.24 – an incredible 113 percent premium over the cash bids. The outcome for the Red Sox tickets showed the same pattern, but the price premium for credit card bids over cash was lower, at 76 percent, perhaps because these seats were not as desired or rare. Were the students who bid with credit cards less able to constrain their desire and more reckless with their bidding? And given that the bids were for items of an uncertain value, how much does this experiment apply to the world of goods with a price tag?
Dilip Soman, a marketing professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, designed a study to look at this very point. Soman intercepted forty-one students after they had made purchases at the campus bookstore and asked them to recall the exact amount
