You can put your keys in a luxury handbag, and tell time on a Swiss-made wristwatch. But there is no material goal when someone buys an NFT.
Yet the “overlap in purchase motivation for NFT art and luxury goods is big,” according to Olivier Tjon, cofounder of Beyond Reason, a neuromarketing consultancy that specializes in identifying the immaterial components behind purchasing decisions. “We would certainly recommend to make NFTs part of your luxury business.”
According to Tjon’s research done exclusively for WWD’s Tech Symposium, people purchase NFT art to assert their superiority, “to direct others,” and to be a role model in the emerging realm of critical digital assets.
Related Articles
Ditto for those who buy physical contemporary art: They wish to impress others, dominate others and “be important.”
You May Also Like
Purchasers of NFT artworks also wish to portray their leadership in “showing the way” in the emerging Web3 world.
Beyond Reason collaborated with neuroscientists to develop implicit research methods to identify the immaterial factors in purchasing decisions that are “under the threshold of conscious thought.” He called it “the twilight zone of marketing and commerce.”
Yet when brands understand the implicit brain activity driving purchasing decisions, they have far greater control and influence. “Our brain decisions are nothing else than subconscious or implicit cost-benefit equations, controlled by a system of associations and implicit goals, not by deliberate conscious thinking,” he explained.
Tjon gave the example of luxury carmaker BMW, which was able to boost sales by amplifying the immaterial motivation of being “bold, daring and assertive” by enlarging the car’s iconic kidney grille, and changing its tagline from “driving pleasure” to “be the one who dares.”
According to Beyond Reason tabulations, “material goals” account for only about 10 percent of the cost-benefit equation for high-end watches and luxury handbags.
Among the immaterial motivations for buying a Rolex Daytona watch, for example, are social status, being important and feeling that “my voice matters,” Tjon said.
An avid mountain runner, he joked that the best thing for “carrying around stuff” is probably a waterproof Xcase bag made of industrial tarpaulin and available on Amazon for about 10 euros.
But an Hermès Kelly handbag, despite a “gigantic price premium,” entices with such immaterial goals as “hierarchy, superiority and admiration,” he said.
“The objects you sell are just a means to fulfill something much more fundamental,” he said. “More than anything else, buying luxurious things such as luxury watches, bags, art and NFT art fulfills our need to have power over others. That’s the most visceral driver of this business.”