I have a friend who is a passionate FC Barcelona supporter. Once, when his team lost, I found him in the kitchen wiping tears off his face. So I asked a logical, or so I assumed, question: how did he become a fan? My friend stopped crying and visibly concentrated. “I think it all started when I bought the FC Barcelona T-shirt”, he finally said. I kept wondering: “So first you bought a T-shirt and then you became a fan?” He nodded.

We know that loads of our buying choices are emotional rather than rational. However, when it comes to specific emotions, such as sexual arousal or fear… Things get much more complicated. Sure, sometimes these messages work. For anyone that doesn’t believe in the power of a fear-based message, conventional marketers suggest going into a building and screaming "fire". However, for marketers, knowing that something works in some cases is not enough. We have to know when, how, and with what products you can scare the customer into going for it.

Freelance and remote work is changing our lives.Change is usually both good and bad, and it’s definitely the case with the freelance trend. So if we want to move into the new world of random working hours and laptops in bed, it’s vital to do so mindfully. 

Advertising is about two things: attention and decision-making. This post will be more about how arousal - the ideal reaction to sexual ads - influences our decision-making. And, as it’s interesting and demonstrative and important to know, we’ll step back from buying behavior and go back to the research on other types of behavior. In this case, sex-related. 

As psychologists and anthropologists suggested long time ago, we live in two different worlds simultaneously: a world of social norms and a world of market norms.The first ones includes doing something good for its own sake. You help your neighbour move in because it’s a nice thing to do and you make a dinner for your family on Thanksgiving without expecting your sister-in-law to pay you back the cost of a restaurant meal. In fact, you’d probably be outraged if she did so.

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost”, said Gilbert K. Chesterton, an English poet and writer. He probably never thought this beautiful but cynical phrase will be quoted by psychologists and economists of our time. And yet it is, for a simple fact: it’s true. This is exactly how our mind values things - in a nutshell.

One day you begin to notice how others use consumer psychology tricks on you. And most of all, of course, you see the huge successful brands do these tricks.