When it comes to bargain holidays and / or package holidays, companies today spend hundreds of millions of dollars studying our behavior-asking us questions, dispatching corporate ethnographers to scrutinize us in our kitchens. In recent years, they have offered to “collaborate” or “co-create” with us-by, say, letting us make design suggestions, or send in ideas for product names, or provide instant online feedback about their wares. Within the commercial persuasion industry, this sort of customer interaction is seen as a sea change, on the theory that it’s the opposite of the one-way communication of a traditional thirty-second ad.
In the end, even today’s product makers and brand owners must understandably filter their view of the consumer through the things they still control, like form and function and image. If you’re a clock maker, then what you have the power to change is your clocks and possibly how your clocks are perceived. So the producer of clocks, or most anything else, must inevitably behave as if the key to cracking the Desire Code lay in the object: To attract Consumer Economicus, build something that helps people solve a problem, or do a job, better than before.
