Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
When was the last time you experienced something and immediately felt taken back to a personal memory? Maybe it was a Christmas tree farm advertising their opening for the season, connotations of cigarettes and their aesthetic or a chef stating their pie was just as good as your grandma’s.
Nostalgia plays a strong role in how we perceive our daily lives, tying our experiences and memories to a meaning that, when translated on paper, may not make total sense.
This is what is called the endowment effect: It occurs when we prescribe a higher value to something we own than we would to the same item if we did not own it. To make things simple, the argument here is we “own” our memories, and therefore attribute whatever the memory is to the object or occurrence of nostalgia. Triggering the endowment effect, we attach the memory to pieces of the physical world around us.
This effect is important to consider, not only because of its personal effects but because of what marketers can achieve through the use of it for capitalist benefit.
So are Marlboros truly the best cigarette, or is it your love of westerns and appearance of the brand making a subconscious correlation? What seems like a harmless tie is in fact something Dan Pilat’s work as the co-founder of The Decision Lab, a behavioral science consulting firm, actually displays as a negative.
His work, alongside that of many other behavioral science strategists, shows that marketing departments directly benefit from these effects. A great example used by Pilat explains why dealerships offer test drives. He writes, “Being able to test drive a car before you buy it is important to get a feel for it — but these tactics are also in place to encourage psychological ownership. The more time you spend using and interacting with a product, the more it starts to feel like yours, and the harder it is to part with it.”
This creates a need to discuss ethical marketing. As Pilat mentions, taking a test drive is important, but to what extent is the endowment effect in play in advertising, and how many times are we being exploited by similar tactics?
The extent to which humans are willing to allow and exploit marketing tactics reliant on psychological behaviors, or “dark patterns,” is one of the most prevalent issues now, especially as artificial intelligence makes algorithms more enticing. When we see the relation between dark patterns and the endowment effect regarding our nostalgic tendencies, it’s impossible not to feel used. When the things we enjoy and the memories we possess are in the hands of certain marketing strategies, they yield to manipulation.
But when is that a rational choice? When are marketing strategies truly dark patterns, and is there any difference between the two?
The next time you watch an ad, see something you want to buy or relate to a promotion, look deeper than the instant emotional connection. Recognizing the difference between personal relations and intentionally marketed ploys helps us develop critical thinking we’re in dire need of as marketing tactics become more powerful than ever.
Reach Vivian Szostak at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
