Earlier this year – and published in Edition #3 of our Fluxe newsletter – we conducted an interview with Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, and an lecturer in behavioral economics at MIT.
Anyone who has read his book will know that one of the main principles of his research is the effect that certain kinds of conditioning produce certain kinds of behavior.
So, for example, when students were asked to recall the ten commandments before taking a test, they were much less likely to cheat than those who were asked to recall ten books they had read.
Ariely is currently working on a project around luxury brands – particularly around the emotional aspect of counterfeit products. His current hypothesis on luxury brands and counterfeiting is that luxury brands could find more efficient ways to decrease consumer enthusiasm for fakes.
When people purchase counterfeits, says Ariely, they think only about how much money they have saved.
What they fail to predict is how it will make them feel later on – for example – when they go to a party and receive compliments on the product. The internal knowledge that it’s fake will have an effect on their internal psychology; producing a kind of internal shame. While other people think you are projecting a positive image, but internally you are aware that you are not.
Says Ariely, “And that turns out to matter. We wear brands not just for the outside world but also for the inside world and it changes the way we behave. When we give people real and fake sunglasses and let them walk around campus then see how much they cheat people who wear fake are more likely to cheat. The notion there is once you have tainted yourself, once you think of yourself as a cheater, it’s easier to make the next step. Based on this, it’s not just important what brands are telling consumer, but it’s also important what consumers are telling themselves; how consumers are using brands to inform themselves.”
Ariely believes that the work that luxury brands have done to try to connect counterfeiting to terrorism and child labor is less effective than stimulating this internal idea of internal shame at point of purchase.
The implications of this are enormous for those luxury brands which are losing significant business to counterfeit products. It suggests that the strategic issue for luxury brands is to reconsider the dramatic ways in which they have demonized counterfeiting in the past – fakes boost terrorism, fakes involve child labor, buy a fake and be stopped at customs etc. Instead the opportunity is to ‘internalize’ the appeal, to communicate more on the personal psychology of the feelings associated with owning a fake.
Ariely believes that encouraging consumers to think about the idea of ‘identity’ is potentially a more powerful way to tackle the issue.
His work on the psychology of counterfeiting is still underway, results will be published at the end of his research. Dan Ariely can be contacted via his website – Predictably Irrational
Image (C) Zevs