Pause Before You Click
We are bombarded with messages designed to make us think we need to purchase goods and services. To make matters worse, it is so easy to get almost anything with a simple click and then have what you bought at our doorstep, sometimes the same day. The downside is that it is easy to over-purchase and overspend.
Mindful Consumption
Mindful consumption helps consumers break from habitual behaviors and view the world from a new perspective. It is based on the premise that the consumer takes care of self and environmental well-being by avoiding excessive, repetitive, and aspirational consumption. Conscious consumption is a behavior in which the consumers consciously seek to minimize societal and ecological degradation. It is about self-awareness and is more controlled by the individual who chooses to practice it, meaning that impulsive buying needs to be controlled by the consumer. In addition, mindfulness has a far more profound impact on beliefs, values, and attitudes and helps bring about desired, sustainable shifts in behavior compared to external stimuli. Research suggests that personal characteristics like selfishness, greed, and apathy are the reasons for overconsumption, which can be minimized by cultivating traits such as compassion, empathy, and generosity, which promotes sustainability.
Mindful Marketing
The concept of mindful marketing gained prominence in the early 20th century. It aligns marketers’ and consumers’ interests in the marketing process. It is a customer-centric approach that is both effective and ethical. The practical component creates stakeholders’ values, and ethical marketing upholds societal values.
Mindfulness can help organizations incorporate the elements of ethics and morality in their business operations. It will make them more responsible towards sustainable development instead of a singular focus on profitability. This would also provide a competitive edge to organizations compared to companies that depend on excessive marketing to promote their products, resulting in indiscriminate consumption. When companies understand psychological factors, such as intention, attention, and attitude, they can encourage mindfulness in consumption and guide consumers toward more sustainable behaviors. Organizations embracing mindfulness in marketing must decide the production, process, and pace of their mindful marketing strategy based on their strengths and weaknesses. Mindful marketing can help organizations understand the value co-creation process, which will help organizations develop value propositions that give them a competitive advantage, subsequently enhancing mindful consumption among consumers.
Slowing the Decision-Making Process
One of the best ways to make purposeful buying decisions is to slow the decision-making process down. By being more aware of thoughts and feelings and realizing the marketing messages we receive are designed to make us make impulse decisions. One way to do this is to engage in the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and the surrounding environment. It is a state of the middle path or about avoiding extremes. Mindfulness is a broad concept that includes an accumulation of wisdom and informed choices. Mindfulness generates awareness to perceive things as they are rather than to react based on external stimuli such as marketing messages.
Recent studies have focused on how mindfulness can minimize the impact of marketing messages that lead to over-consumption. Mindfulness centers on awareness of inner and outer stimuli and weakens attachments to habitual behaviors, resulting in transformative choices.
Simple Steps to Slow the Decision-Making Process
Remove payment choices. By removing the credit card payment, you must add the information each time you want to make a purchase. This means that some time will lapse before you click purchase.
Social media ads. Don’t click on websites from a social media app. To know more, open the app and type in the website. If you aren’t familiar with the company, you can search for the company to find out more.
Block emails. If you are susceptible to offers made by select retailers, block their emails and subscribe.
Set a timer on your basket. Once you have items in your basket that you want to purchase, set a timer for at least 30 minutes and do something else. Don’t let messages such as only a few left push you to click now.
