When No One Buys Product Anymore

Quite often that when I am driving my car, I would have a lot of things going on in my mind. I think driving stimulates my brain somehow. My ideas just kept popping when I am driving. When I got into my car, I knew where my destination is, what I am suppose to do, how focused I should be and I know what I want for lunch today.

From a driver's point of view, I would see lots and lots of ads on the street, signage, photos of food and drinks and a lot of times they trigger my appetite. When I got into my car, I knew that I wanted something light for my lunch, like salad or something along that line. I often brought my lunch with me. But then, when I saw an advertisement of a fancy Chinese food restaurant, I suddenly thought, hm that looks good too. Then I could feel my flavour buds tingled and I could sort of taste the flavour of that dish. It came across my mind that the food in that photo does not look too bad for my lunch. Moving a couple of kilometres, there is a photo of icy cold ice latte on the road side. I was wanting water before, but now my mind said a milky drink will be satisfactory. Suddenly everything in my lunch box became mundane and I just wanted to go out and got the ones advertised.

Visuals have the power to shift our want. We are not talking about needs anymore here. I need to eat, but what I want is totally a different story. Without realising, these advertisement jungle has changed our wants a lot of time. If I am not thinking consciously, I would easily stop and get an ice latte although that was totally not what I wanted before.

Having a lunch box is also boring. Although my lunch box was filled with fancy food, sometimes each one of us got bored. We knew that we have our food and we need to eat. But sometimes, this life is just too boring that I want to go out and spend some money on expensive food. We are all bored. We are not looking forward to eat, we just want the experience of getting the food. Walking out from our office desk, chatting with friends along the way, checking out how other people look that day on the way to the food court, browsing at which stalls we would want to spend our money today, queuing, copying what other people is ordering, selecting our order, adding this and that to our food, pay for it and eat together with our friends. So much nicer than just opening a lunch box that we filled today and we knew already what is in it.

No one ever now is buying mere product. Everyone is buying an experience. Because we are bored, we need interaction and we need attention. Is that fair that all of these pleasant experience makes up the price? You decide.'