10: The Homeostatic System
Homeostasis (literally 'same state") is the attempt of an organism to remain as it is, provided the current state of the organism is acceptable. When we are comfortable, we do not wish to be made uncomfortable; when we are uncomfortable, we wish to return to a state of being comfortable.
The most basic reason that people buy products is to maintain their desired normal state. Our "comfortable" condition is the result of the benefits of the products we use on a regular basis, and our desire to maintain that state motivates us to buy and use the same products over and over.
However, this pertains to "products" and not necessarily to brands. A person who is thirsty wants to drink, not a specific brand of soda, and if the brand they prefer is not available, and if they become thirsty enough, they buy a different brand. The goal of the brand marketer is to adjust that threshold, and push back the point at which the customer abandons their loyalty to brand and seeks a substitute.
The System
The homeostatic system has a vital survival function: we must know when conditions are acceptable, and recognize and respond to hunger, thirst, temperature, and other changes in our own bodies or the environment that lead us away from the acceptable state. There are some tolerances: we can sense that we are a little bit uncomfortable and accept that condition for a time, but we will ultimately seek to return to homeostasis.
It's been said that people are resistant to change, and this is a natural tendency: change takes us out of homeostasis, and reshaping the comfort zone is not something that is easily done.
(EN: Perhaps the author will get to this, but that's a significant obstacle for new products or new brands: selling the customer on the concept that they need to try something that will put them in a different state, adjusting their perception of homeostasis.)
Homeostasis is often considered in terms of physicality: hunger, thirst, pain, and the like. It is also true of emotional state. When we feel anxious or afraid, we wish to return to a normal state of not feeling that way. In many instances, we notice our emotional state before we make the logical connection to the physical situation that has effected those emotions.
Hunger, for example, is an emotion rather than a physical condition. In terms of survival, a person can live for about a month without taking food, and given the average amount of body fat, can live for a week without suffering any damage at all. And yet, we feel the need to eat about four to six hours after our last mean. We do not need food, we feel hungry.
Consider the question: "How do you know when you feel hungry?" Most people will respond that "I just do," and consider the very question to be absurd. Physiologically, the sensation begins in the liver (not the stomach, as is often thought) and pancreas, which sense the glucose level of our blood, and send messages to the brain when it falls below an acceptable threshold.
(EN: I wonder if it's ever been considered that diabetes may be essentially a brain disorder. The general perception is that it is a dysfunction of the pancreas - it doesn't "make" enough insulin - when in truth it could well be that the organ is functional, but does not send and receive signals that tell it to increase or decrease production.)
Physiologically, the body senses a drop after three or four hours of a meal, though food is typically digested over the next 8-12 hours before the body begins to consume its stores of body fat, which it wants desperately to preserve. The author goes into various details about the hormones that are involved in the process of feeling hungry, that increase over this time and give the person - specifically, the person's emotional brain - an increasingly strong sense of hunger, an increasingly strong desire to eat.
The gradual onset of feelings makes a lot of sense rather than having hunger function like an alarm that sounds all at once: it has the functional effect of giving us a relatively long amount of time to address the situation, enabling us to deal with the situation at our convenience. If we experienced hunger all at once, in an "eat or die" impulse, the consequences would be unfortunate.
It's also worth noting that the feeling of hunger does not operate in isolation, but triggers other emotional responses: we become irritable when hunger persists, even panicked if it persists for too long. This befuddles our attempt to assess hunger as an emption - a person will remark that they feel hungry, or feel a given level of hunger intensity, at different levels of intensity of different emotions.
Emotion and Consumerism
The author refers again to Greenfield, who considered the way that emotions cause a customer to undertake the action to purchase a product - in this case, an orange.
As a prerequisite, the person does not have an orange (or they would have no need to purchase one), and isn't even thinking about an orange until there is an external or internal stimulus: they see an orange, or a picture of an orange, or hear the word "orange," or see the word in print, or have some other sensation that puts them in mind of an orange - a scent, the color, something round, etc.
As a first step, we may or may not notice these stimuli at all. We experience them, but given the environment, our mood, and other factors, we may be focused on the orange triggers, we may perceive them unconsciously, or they may be filtered out altogether. So there's no guarantee that any of the triggers will actually cause anything to happen, or for us to think about an orange at all.
If we do think about an orange, we touch upon the "orange" gestalt, we activate the idiosyncratic connections we have to oranges. It may be the physical properties of the orange itself (color, texture, scent), our experiences of consuming an orange (satisfaction, heartburn), and even memories that have nothing to do with consumption (a pleasant or painful memory of an encounter with a person wearing the color orange, a situation in which a dish or oranges was in the background, etc.)
The strength and extent of those connections depends on personal experience, and are surfaced when we consider an orange, and ultimately result in an emotional response - to want (or not want) to have an orange in our possession, for immediate or future consumption. This feeling of desire for an orange will be short-lived or persistent, strong or weak, also depending on the idiosyncratic connections.
If the sensation is strong enough, positive enough, and persistent enough, the consumer purchases an orange. Perhaps it's strong enough that he sets out right away on a quest to buy an orange, or perhaps it's filed away for the next time he's at the market. Perhaps it's on his shopping list, or perhaps it's an impulse buy. It all depends on the emotion.
This example demonstrates the basic process of emotion in consumerism: sensation, filtering, perception, gestalt, emotion, though, and action.
Bio-Measures And Homeostasis
The EEG (electroencephalograph) is the favored tool of the neuroscientists, as it measures electrical activity in the brain. It's been mentioned before that its capabilities are still unrefined, in that it gives only a general sense certain areas of the brain are experiencing activity, but is the best tool science currently has to offer.
As such, the EEG can give us a vague sense of what brain centers are active - comparing the activity of a person who is hungry to a person who has just eaten a big mean when they are presented a stimulus that we expect will trigger the "food" gestalt. So insofar as using the EEG to determine homeostatic states, "we are still hoping."
The second alternative is to merely ask a test subject about their state. Are you hungry? Is it too cold in this room? Not only does this require a subjective and unscientific evaluation, responding to a question requires the subject to apply "thinking" skills - even if they do not meditate on the question, they must process it as language, understand what it means, and then decide how to respond. This is entirely unscientific and, insofar as knowing the true homeostatic state, pathetically inaccurate.
And so, while we must acknowledge that in the real world in which consumers make buying decisions, they are strongly influenced by their homeostatic state - a person who is hungry is more likely to be attentive to stimuli that trigger the food gestalt - but in the laboratory environment, our ability to measure and quantify such things remains extremely limited and inaccurate.