Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: darwinism, economy, market evolution
As marketers continue to delve deeper into the psyche of the consumer mind to better understand what makes people buy the things they buy, we venture beyond behavioral and cultural sciences to more primal instincts based on an innate desire to impress the opposite sex in finding the quality mate.
If it sounds Darwinian, it is.
A new breed of evolutionary psychologists is bringing a very different viewpoint to consumerism that offers significant implications to marketing. They adhere to the belief that certain psychological traits that shape our behavior are genetically adaptive, not learned, that they are a functional product of natural selection and sexual selection that has evolved from the time of cave dwellers.
Even though we’re not looking for a mate, the basic instinct to enhance or display our image or personality traits, what they refer to as “fitness indicators,” is one of the strongest and most basic of human instincts, as well as all other animal species.
