Marketing Is Less About What You Buy And More About What You've Been Trained To Buy

Recently I was reading The Psychology of Marketing by Harinder Singh Pelia when I came across this sentence and it started a series of thoughts in my head. I looked back at my recent purchases.

There was a skincare serum I bought because three people I follow on Instagram used the same shade of "glass skin" language to describe it. There was a pair of sneakers I chose not because I needed them, but because a brand I had quietly admired for years finally went on sale. There was even a book I picked up purely because its cover had that specific shade of sage green that every bookstagram account seemed to be styling that month.

None of these were impulsive in the way we usually think of impulse buying. I did not regret any of them. I could justify each one with a perfectly reasonable sentence. And that is exactly what unsettled me. If I could explain away every purchase so smoothly, when had the explaining actually started? Long before I stood at the checkout page, is the honest answer.

This is the quiet brilliance of what Pelia is pointing to. We like to imagine that buying is a moment of choice, a small rational decision made in the present. In truth, that moment is usually just the last click in a much longer chain that started weeks or months earlier, when an idea was planted somewhere in the periphery of our attention. A well placed ad here. A recommendation from someone whose opinion we trust more than we should. An algorithm quietly noting what we lingered on, then serving us more of the same the next day and the day after, until wanting it starts to feel like it was always our own idea.

Marketing, at its most effective, does not sell products. It sells inevitability. It works backward from the purchase and builds a path so gradual that by the time you arrive at the product, you are not being persuaded anymore, you are simply confirming a decision your mind had already made for you. This is why the best campaigns rarely mention the product in the first few seconds. They mention a feeling, a status, an identity you already want to inhabit. The product just happens to be the object that lets you inhabit it.

Having worked on the other side of this, building content and campaigns for brands, I recognise the mechanics even as I fall for them myself. That is perhaps the strangest part of this profession. Knowing how the trick works does not make you immune to it. If anything, it makes you a more willing participant, because you can admire the craft even while being moved by it.

So maybe the more useful question is not "why did I buy this" but "when did I start being trained to want this." The answer is rarely at the point of sale. It's earlier, quieter, and far more interesting.

I think that is what Pelia's sentence is really asking us to notice. Not that we are being manipulated in some sinister way, but that desire itself has a design behind it, one that most of us never bother to trace back to its source.