How to Make Brilliant Stuff That People Love ... And Make Big Money Out of It by Patrick W. Jordan

Author:Patrick W. Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 0470847115, General, Advertising & Promotion, Business & Economics, Marketing
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2003-03-28T05:21:05+00:00

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ing. It worked – kind of. The record doesn’t show how it affected the actors, but within a week fights were breaking out in the canteen between other staff on the movie set. He had it repainted!

As well as being associated with calm, blue is also associated with trust. This is probably one of the reasons why it is a color that is often favored by banks and other financial institutions where trust and reliability is the name of the game. It is difficult to know whether this is a biological or an environmental thing. Off hand there doesn’t seem to be any obvious biological reason why we should feel that blue is something that we can trust. Nevertheless, the association does seem to work all over the world. One of the major Korean banks, for example, carried out a study in which they looked at how people responded to certain colors on the screens of ATM machines. The aim was to find a color that would enhance the users’ feelings of trust, both in the bank and in the ATM itself. Again, blue came out as the color most associated with trust.

Ideo-pleasure

Ideo-pleasure relates to people’s tastes, values and aspirations. Tastes are about our personal judgements about what we like. They are judgements which are about preference but without any explicit component of moral judgement. For example, I may think that blue clothes look better on me than red clothes. Given the choice of buying a blue sweater

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or a red sweater I would, all things being equal, choose the blue sweater. That is not to say, however, that I believe wearing blue sweaters is in any way morally preferable to wearing red sweaters.

Value judgements, by contrast, are preferences with a moral component to them. For example, if a person were concerned with the environment they might regard it as a moral responsibility to buy only environmentally friendly products. Aspirations, meanwhile, are about how people wish to define themselves. A person might aspire to be a good parent, a modern man, a traditional woman, a career woman, a good husband. All these are possible ways in which people may define themselves. Their choices with respect to the stuff that they own and use can help to reinforce these self-images or may undermine them.

By their very nature, tastes are likely to be the least stable of these, because they are not based on judgements of moral value or desired self-image. They may change fairly rapidly.

That is not to say that they definitely will. Some people may be very consistent in their preferences. Nevertheless, the constant streaming onto the market of products with new aesthetics is testimony to how people’s tastes change.

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