Why We Buy

by Paco Underhill

  Yes, an architect and an equally well-known carmaker. The way I see it, Facebook is a direct extension of the popularization of the suburb and of the automobile. Both have created enormous physical distances among people. As the world gets more and more de-urbanized and we spread out across the country and the world, with a lot of us toiling away in isolated corporate campuses, we still can’t get away from our basic human need to reach out and connect with other people (housing is often key to understanding a lot of new phenomena, social networking sites included). Across that shadowy, gaping void of alienation and risk and uncertainty comes Facebook, a virtual passport to intimacy. A kind of intimacy, I should say.

  Once again, the web has found itself identifying and fixing a hole in our physical world. By doing its usual watery thing, it’s allowed us to meet and chat and feel as though we’re a part of something bigger than our high schools, college campuses, bedrooms and office cubicles. Facebook is not only a social networking site, it’s a voyeur’s dream. It’s like reading a loose-leaf, picture-filled diary someone has left splayed open on a couch. It’s a way of seeing what your friends are doing, in real time, even if you have no desire, reason or inclination to call, e-mail or in some cases lay eyes on them ever again. It’s a Google map of your entire social network. For some users, it provides an opportunity to show off how many friends and connections and wall-postings they have, and to cement their social status in public. For others, it’s just plain convenient, like an illustrated address book that’s constantly self-updating. It’s addictive.

  Facebook has created an entirely self-contained miniuniverse in which my sixteen-year-old nephew, say, can have an online conversation with a girl who, under normal circumstances, he’d be too tongue-tied to talk to face-to-face. The intimacy that’s created by not having to look at someone physically has its parallels in the retail environment, too—for example, we’ve migrated from the nose-to-nose relationship of dealing with a saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s across a makeup counter to the open sell at Sephora, where you and the person helping you are on the same side of the counter and seemingly on the same team. Part of what we’re seeing is the early stages of a transformation in communication and intimacy. From my cynical standpoint, Facebook users are triangulating through the social network because they lack the courage, opportunity and geographical proximity to come face-to-face with an actual living, breathing human being.

  But how long will the Facebooks of the world last? Will Facebook end up turning into a semipermanent virtual village? (The standard line in social science buzz is that almost everybody lives in a “village” made up of approximately two hundred people.) At what point does a Facebook user decide that since he or she hasn’t spoken, e-mailed, texted or called a friend in her network in three years, that person might as well be given the boot? Does a user ever “graduate” from Facebook? Most people I know who use it say they can’t foresee a time, date, place or age when they wouldn’t be invested, somehow, in their Facebook accounts. And as we come out of the suburbs and are faced with the mobility in our culture, social networking—a means of finding some kind of cyber-permanence within the context of our ongoing lives, as well as a common identity—may always have its place. Lacking an anchor in a transitory world, your life can disappear, poof, like that. The only question left, then, is do you give two hoots if it disappears?

  Still, Facebook and other social networking sites are famously having trouble justifying the cost structures that keep them up and running, namely, ads. Can we scribble virtual notes on our friends’ walls and pay attention to soda entreaties at the same time?

  I get many invitations each year to join one online social networking site or another. I never bite. Still, at age fiftysomething, I have boxfuls of business cards I’ve been handed from across the world, so many that if I laid them end to end, I could build a cardboard stairway to heaven. Maybe that’s my version of Facebook.

  People’s spread-out-ness works at the other extreme, too. There are cultures in which economic prosperity may have provided gleaming gadgets and connectivity, yet people are still living in small, crowded spaces. Which is one reason why in a sense, the Japanese and Koreans use technology to wall themselves off—to create a sense of virtual privacy. In a crowded Japanese home or apartment, the ability to vanish inside the Internet or into your mobile phone is like ducking inside a pup tent or adding on an extra wing.

  Another thing the Internet has accomplished in Korea and Japan is to conduct a nifty end-run around social restrictions and manners. In these two countries, where it’s impolite to actually look someone straight in the eye, Facebook and instant messaging are ways of staring and not staring at the same time. Also, if you think about Japanese kids on a mobile phone, they use a minimal amount of strokes to create a complex declarative sentence. As they start typing a word phonetically, the character pops up, making it infinitely speedier to communicate. Contrast this to American teenagers, who’ve had to come up with their own homemade abbreviations to cut down on the keystrokes—LOL—while their parents continue madly thumbing away at their BlackBerries. All of which makes communication in Asian countries faster, and is one reason why the role of the net-enabled phone has found a natural home there.

  Another difference in Japan, Korea and many emerging markets: Public transportation isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. The average citizen may spend two or more hours a day commuting. It’s bad manners to talk on the phone as they ride the train or bus, but with a web-enabled phone they can surf and text-message to their hearts’ content. It isn’t just a time-saver, it’s another cyber body-bubble. In Europe and America, we can drive and chat on our phones in the privacy of our cars, but we can’t stare hypnotically into them or we’d topple over the guardrail. Why should we be surprised that cyber applications will have varying degrees of success based on the markets they serve?

  I wonder what will happen now that our thumbs (rather than our forefingers) are doing all the work. Whoever designed our hands made them so that the thumb is the source of strength and the other fingers are in charge of the delicate stuff. What happens when arthritis sets in—are our IM days over?

  Facebook isn’t the only electronic tribe out there, and in theory, it’s more about friendship and belonging and creating a giant alumni association than it is about actual meeting up and settling down. The Internet has become, in essence, a kind of modern-day Jewish match-maker, creating sites such as Match.com, where a red-haired guy in Des Moines who stands five feet one inch tall can tell the world he’s six feet four inches’ worth of tawny, easygoing California beach boy. That is, until he meets up with an actual woman who just can’t believe she fell for it again.

  The problem with Match.com and with every other look-up-hookup-and-settle-down site is that they’re founded on mutual compatibility. Remember the questionnaire you were possibly given once about what sort of roommate you’d like to have your freshman year in college? Nonsmoker, vegetarian, likes Metallica etc. These same standards go hand in hand with online mating services. You play tennis? Me too. We’re both not-very-serious Buddhists. We both love Italy and Monty Python and cats and…you get the picture. In the end, the whole thing becomes a potential orgy of self-love, a union of mirrors. When we fall in love, are we really looking for a person who’s exactly like us? If I had to date myself I’m pretty sure I’d announce, “This isn’t working,” after about a day.

  This is one of the chief limitations of the web. It thinks and perceives and processes data like a computer, because it is a computer. It lacks the capacity to be thoughtful or inventive or intuitive in an original way. Even Amazon.com is guilty of this. Its predictive mode is based on the premise that past behavior (you like John Grisham) defines future behavior (you’ll keep on liking John Grisham). Now, this is very likely true for many readers, but at the same time, a lot of us are always on the lookout for novelty. Just because I love James Lee Burke novels doesn’t mean I won’t get a kick out of a new book on hang gl
iding in the Galapagos or a new bio of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor, but the wonderfully weird nineteenth-century explorer).

  Come to think of it, some of the strongest unions I know are between two people who are completely unalike. There’s this couple I know, Richard and Stacy. Richard is my market research mentor. He likes the New York Mets, basketball, a few beers and Chinese takeout, and he knows more about Finnish cinema than anyone I’ve ever met. Stacy, who’s the love of his life, is an aficionado of five-star restaurants and gourmet vacations, and has never gotten off an airplane without knowing that a deluxe hotel and a megavolt hair-dryer were waiting for her at the other end. But Richard and Stacy adore each other. It’s the second or third marriage for each of them, but this one’s going the distance. And what keeps them together, in my opinion, is that every day they have to compromise and roll their eyes skyward at each other’s foibles.

  They would never have met if Match.com had set them up. Not even close.

  There are lots of people out there who’ve carried off the whole When Harry Met Sally thing. They meet in college, break up, get together again, bust up a second time, then reunite—this time forever and ever. Those guys and dolls who were meant to be tootsified got married at twenty-seven, and that was it. I’m happy they knew what they wanted when they wanted it. For the rest of us who failed that standard practice, we’re back on street level, back in the churning mill. We recognize with a touch of bittersweetness that if we haven’t settled down by age thirty, there’s probably a good reason why—that there might be something a tiny bit faulty with us. For all its imperfections, the net has at least been able to facilitate hooking up for the over-forty set.

  The triumph of hope over experience—it’s just a couple of clicks away.

  Generally, so much of what we spend money on is so predictable that if we thought about it too much, we’d question whether or not we were conscious. For most of us over age forty, 80 percent of what’s inside the fridge at home is routine purchases. Yes, we may change the cheese, vegetables and meat based on the season, but the basics remain the same. By now I know what I like: Tropicana orange juice with pulp. Skim Plus Parmalat milk. Low-fat plain Dannon yogurt. Cream cheese with scallions. French mustard. Malaysian chili sauce. A few beers. I’ve even settled on a label and vintage of white wine my significant other and I both enjoy drinking.

  But is there any reason why we can’t endow the web, or our kitchens, with the power to carry out our most routine shopping purchases? The Japanese are working on a refrigerator that allows you to scan the bar codes and radio frequency identification tags of items going in. The machine knows when they’re missing or that the weight has declined. It then sends you a daily or weekly text message asking your permission to place an order with an online emporium. The same thing goes for the laundry room, where a web-empowered shelf or storage system keeps accurate track of your soap, bleach and fabric softener. Unfortunately, the lifespan of most appliances is ten years or more, while the typical software lifespan is less than two years. The problem is making the hardware and the software truly compatible.

  The future of the Internet as I see it: convergence. It may sound a little sci-fi, but all I’m talking about is the linkup between the physical world and mobile technology and the web—an improved union between stores, the online world and the mobile phone. Recently I was struck by an interesting way to quantify any customer’s potential value to a retailer. If I’m a store owner, and my customers only shop my products out on the floor, they’re “worth” one unit. If they shop the store and also glance through my catalog, they’re worth 1.5 units. If they shop, read the catalog and also visit the website, they’re worth two units—meaning that my relationship to customers in terms of the amount of money they spend is in direct proportion to the number of ways they interact with me.

  As an example of convergence, consumers could take their web-enabled mobile phone into their local drugstore and point it, say, at an over-the-counter drug. The shelf would then direct them to a website that tells them what the drug does and doesn’t do, its dosage, its side effects etc., which they scan on their phones. Simple, right?

  Convergence also advances a phenomenon that’s already making inroads in online shopping: the Internet as a green tool. A friend of mine recently caved in and bought an iPhone. Instead of reading a foldout instruction manual that told him how to use it, the box it arrived in directed him to an Apple website which screened an instructional video. Same thing happened when I bought my new, fancy-schmancy Casio watch from a Japanese department store. It came with a web address from which I could download the instructions onto my desktop. That way, I wasn’t frustratedly parsing an instruction book in twenty-three languages from French to Serbo-Croatian.

  So whether it’s instruction booklets or boxes and bags, convergence is among other things a great way to eliminate excess clutter and paper and packaging, just as the web-connected refrigerator that I described earlier streamlines shopping trips and merchants’ distribution processes. And somewhere out there, the world’s landfills will be breathing a sigh of relief.

  The second function within this system is its ability to replace our wallets and become a wallet (and a bank) at the same time. At the DoCoMo store in Japan and in the Philippines, you can preload your mobile phone with cash or your mobile phone can accept wire transfers. Particularly in third-world countries like the Philippines, this provides an end-run around banking institutions, a valuable perk to say the least for people who don’t have a bank account. Think of it as the currency of mobile phone minutes. At the same time, it also serves as a safety net for worried parents in a scary world. By loading money onto their kids’ mobile phones, at the end of the month they can see how that money has been spent, whether it’s on cheeseburgers and the movies—as the little ones claimed—or on a half-ounce of high-octane pot. Another bonus? Safety. Once you start putting cash into electronic form, crime plummets.

  The third and final bonus of a web-enabled mobile is that it would also work as a form of personal ID. It would connect somehow to your physical self in a way that would allow the phone to work only when it was in your vicinity. Meaning if you drop the thing in a gutter by accident or someone steals it, the phone becomes for all intents and purposes useless.

  What the web-enabled phone also does is create a network that bypasses the traditional media of both the web and of face-to-face communication. The elections in Spain in March of 2004 were influenced partly by all the instant messaging provoked by the deadly terrorist train bombings in Madrid that happened on the eve of the election. No one was debating political issues, but an online community was able to shore up its allegiances. So we now have the tools to disseminate information in a way that transcends phones, magazines and newspapers—and that connects us all locally.

  To take convergence to a retail level, it could also mean that the bricks-and-mortar model, with its distribution systems and supply chain management, might be ripe for overhaul. The era of the big-box merchant, at least in the first world, has reached its apogee. Stores may be getting bigger, but that doesn’t mean consumers plan on spending a correspondingly increased amount of time, or money, in them. Scaling down stores makes both economic and ecological sense. If we start ordering our staples online—and even if we only swing by and pick them up at the store—do we really need that laundry aisle?

  Come to think of it, when we reach the point of convergence, the entire purpose of a physical existence may have to be dramatically reconsidered. The United States is investing huge sums of money in nation-building outside the country (think Iraq), but in the meantime our docks, ports and bridges are rotting, our passenger railroads are vanishing and we’ve all but lost the capacity to think big or be bold. We are backing into the future. At a time when we need to get beyond our addiction to fossil fuels and take better care of our planet, we are stuck. A hundred and fifty years ago it took vision to push our railroads across the country; a hundred years ago it took
guts to conceive and build the Panama Canal. Today, America is a follower, not a leader—so convergence will happen somewhere else first.

  Convergence will initially find its footing in someplace like Africa or India where someone doesn’t own, or have access to, a landline. Part of what I find interesting about visiting India is that for reasons of space, density, primitive retail and an absence of things that Americans and Western Europeans take for granted, it’s a country that’s managing to leapfrog the traditional landline. Visiting Delhi recently, I was struck by the number of people whose mobile phones were always in their hands—far more so than in New York City. Mobile phones weren’t just for calling; they served as their owners’ pivotal identities. People’s mobile phone numbers were at least as, or more, important as their names.

  This makes sense when you contrast India’s path with the evolution of technology followed by most Americans. First we had our landlines. Next we had our computers, followed by the Internet, followed by the first mobile phones. (Recall if you will that the first mobile phone stores didn’t appear in the U.S. until the late ’80s and early ’90s, and were used mostly by business guys. I can remember once attending the opera with a friend who’d never used a mobile phone before. She glanced down at mine as if it were an exotic mango. When she called her daughter, the first excited words out of her mouth were, “Guess what—I’m calling you on a mobile phone!”) After that, some of us graduated to PDAs, which ushered us into the first mobile Internet world. Oh, and incidentally, the next time I saw the woman from the opera, she was the proud possessor of both a mobile phone and a BlackBerry.

  If you ask most people, they’ll tell you that mobile phones have been around forever, rather than since the early 1990s.

  Compare this technological journey to that of an emerging country, where someone is going to migrate from having nothing—no landline, no laptop—to suddenly, overnight, having the Internet at his or her fingertips. In Delhi, it was almost comical overhearing people calling each other on their mobiles. Where are you? I’m going to be three minutes late. Made me wonder how people got along before mobile phones appeared.