With appeals to the heart increasingly difficult, brands that appeal to
the genitals are thriving. These organs drive desire and the relentless
instinct to procreate. After survival, nothing rings louder in our ears
than sex. Fortunately for marketers, sex and mating rituals overwhelm
the brain’s killjoy warnings about risk and expense. Just ask any
sixteen-year-old—or a fifty-year-old shopping for a sports car.
When we’re in a mating frame of mind, we seek brain silencers. We
drink. We take drugs. We dim the lights, as light is a tool for the brain,
and turn up the music. A study of men and women who engaged in an
uncommitted sexual encounter that included penetrative sex showed
71 percent were drunk at the time.^7 These people purposefully,
chemically switched off their brains, creating “compulsory
carelessness.”^8 If you wonder, the next morning, “What was I
thinking?” you weren’t. Few drunk people pull out their smartphone to
compare the cost of a Grey Goose and soda at nearby bars, as they do
when shopping for a Nespresso coffeemaker.
We’re irrational and generous when under the influence. The
combination of alcohol and the pursuit of youth leaves us swimming in
hormones and desire. We’re very in the moment. Luxury brands have
understood this for centuries. They bypass cognition and love, tying
their business to sex and the broader and pleasure-packed ecosystem
of mating rituals. Men have been driven, since humanity’s caveman
days, to spread their seed to the four corners of the Earth. Men strut
power and wealth, attempting to signal to females (or, in some cases,
other men) we’ll be good providers; our progeny are more likely to
survive. The Panerai watch you’re wearing signals to potential partners
that if they mate with you, their offspring is more likely to survive than
if they mate with someone wearing a Swatch.
By comparison, women’s evolutionary role is to attract as many
suitors as possible, so as to select the most promising—strongest,
fastest, smartest—mate. To this end, women will contort into a $1,085
pair of ergonomically impossible Christian Louboutin platform shoes
rather than wear comfortable twenty-dollar flats.
These decisions, if you can call them that, cast the consumer and
provider into a symbiotic relationship. The consumer spends more
because the act of spending itself communicates taste, wealth and
privilege, and desire. The company, naturally, is dedicated to the same