Brand and Butter
The straight-talking branding podcast for leaders who refuse to settle.
Brand and Butter delivers no-BS advice on how psychology, strategy, and design create brands that work. Host Tara Ladd, founder of Your One & Only brand design studio, breaks down the real influence and power of branding – how understanding behaviour and cultural shifts can transform how people see, think, and choose.
Sometimes funny, always honest, never dull. This is the podcast that cuts through industry jargon to talk about what actually makes brands stick.
Tara Ladd is the founder of Your One and Only, who design brands that breathe with culture through psychology, strategy, and design.
Brand and Butter
How Manufactured Urgency Rewired Our Buying Habits
In this episode of Brand and Butter, I'm diving into the whirlwind that is Black Friday. Ever wondered why we all get caught up in the frenzy of sales and urgency? Let's chat about the psychology behind it and how this U.S shopping spree has taken over the world. We'll explore the ethical questions brands face and how this day reflects our own buying habits and values. Whether you're a brand guru or just curious about the hype, join me for a laid-back conversation that might just change how you see those big red sale signs.
Visit https://youroneandonly.com.au/
Follow YO&O on IG https://www.instagram.com/youroneandonly_au/
Follow Tara on IG https://www.instagram.com/iamtaraladd/
Connect with Tara on https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarajoyladd/
Sign up for the Design Mind Theory Email – See how other Brands use psychology to nail their strategies.
You're listening to Brandon Butter, for straight talking, occasionally in your face, no BS, branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. For those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and health caring associations, consumer behaviour and design thinking can impact what people see, think and feel. I'm your host, Carl Lang, who's sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically blunt, founder and creative director of Brand and Design Agency, your one and only. Hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Brand and Butter. I was supposed to do one last week, but I got distracted and well, it didn't go out. Um look, I'm here or there, bore for adhering to a timeline that my body cannot adhere to. So I took a break. So we're back. But this week I want to talk about Black Friday and the psychology of manufactured urgency, which I feel like a lot of people are witnessing at the moment. I get it. Anyway, I'll talk about this. Okay. Basically, it's a global holiday, and it's not even our holiday in Australia. It's Black Friday. And it's like an annual pressure cooker, psychologically, and we're willingly just doing things because it's a sale. It's something from the US. It's a celebration of consumption. Ironically, sitting directly after gratitude. It's the sale after Thanksgiving. And because we're excellent at globalization, we built an entire international system around it. We're seeing this happen not just in Australia, it's happening in the UK, literally everywhere that doesn't actually celebrate Thanksgiving, which is wild. But we're looking at the fact that every brand now feels that they have to participate. Every consumer now knows that they should probably wait to buy something, and somehow this is all considered normal. What I want to say is is it marketing or is it social conditioning? I want to talk about this today. So basically, every year when I see Black Friday starts early or sale coming soon, plastered literally everywhere online. Smashing my inbox, my first reaction isn't irritation, it's interest. Because what I'm looking at isn't a sale, right? Like we if you're looking at it, you're kind of wondering how this even happened. And it kind of happened after COVID. It's like behavioral engineering in real time. That's like what I don't even know what else you could call it. But it's the need to always be on. It's like manufactured adrenaline, the pressure disguised as opportunity. Everyone's like in this fast-paced world, you have to do more, we have to do this. It's like running on a hamster wheel and not having a time to jump off and just watch the world move around you. Honestly, it's wild watching countries who don't celebrate it. I said that before, but it just became like spiritually tethered to a US discount event. How else do you anyway? It's like Halloween all over again: globalized, commodified, and rolled out with a bow. But at least people somewhat celebrate Halloween. Like they're not even celebrating Thanksgiving. But let's call Black Friday, I guess, for what it is. It's a full-blown behavioral science cocktail. So if you look at the lineup of all of the things that are involved in it, we have scarcity bias. Only this weekend we have things like loss aversion. You'll lose money if you don't buy it now. There's FOMO, also fear of missing out, which is everyone else is getting it. Why aren't you? Urgency loops, timers, countdowns, card expires in five minutes, even though it's a complete freaking lie. And reward anticipation. So you get like a dopamine rush from saving. This isn't just marketing, it's real psychological pressure with a nice little red this much off percentage sign tag. So what we need to do is really look at it like I guess at a time when the economy is really unstable and people are restricting their spending. Black Friday works even better. Not because it's ethical, because it hits the exact emotional vulnerabilities the cost of living crisis has created. Which coincides into why it's become so much bigger after COVID. It basically guilt trips people into buying early for Christmas in fear of overpaying. And it forces small businesses to compete in a game that was never designed for them. Like we're talking about bigger commercialized companies like Amazon or all these bigger companies that can put these sales on and it doesn't cut into their margin because they're able to buy things in stock and they get them at a discount. But smaller businesses can't do things like that. So it eats into their profits. And it increases the wage gap. Like, well, not necessarily wage gap, but the the wealth divide, the class gap. It widens the wealth divide. I'm deep in thought about this. Like it just makes me think. So there's nuance around it. It's not, I guess we the way you look at it. Like, I don't see people that have a sale on and go, oh, you're such a bad person. It's not, it's not that at all. So it's not in inherently unethical. It's just not neutral either. The way I see it is like Black Friday is a mirror. And the reflection isn't great. It if you look at it right, it reveals how deeply consumption has become culture. How value has been redefined as discounted, and how the meaning of buying has shifted from identity to urgency. And we're also seeing a bit of a resistance though, which is good. So people are craving meaning instead of more, and they're craving brands that don't hijack attention for a quarterly spike. And they're craving experiences, community, and slowness, which is actual real life. So we've seen notoriously in terms of self-identity that people consume things to mask or to fill a void. So this actually dives into self-identity and self-expression in whatever is happening in their life, whatever that purchasing behavior is. It's a decision and it dives into, you know, your feelings. Think about when you've had a rough day or you're emotional, you go and order a pizza or you grab a wine or you celebrate something, go out for dinner. Like some of these choices that we make are so well, they are, they're all choices are emotionally driven. Logic second, basic behavioral economics 101. But the when we're looking, when we're looking at it from a sense of fulfillment, buying shit doesn't make you make you happier. I mean, it might temporarily, and it might be a signifier to something else, but the the meaning of happiness is something else. So if you do end up buying the car that you've been working your ass off for for a really long time, that feeling is accomplishment. It's not the car. The same thing with financial benefits, right? Like you build a business, you make money. You could make all the money in the world, but you could still not be happy because you may not be fulfilled in family life or friendship or social circles or environment. Like there's so many different factors. And I think that everyone just assimilates, or not assimilates, but like connects financial happiness to happiness in general. And although I believe that to be true, right? Having money helps you to make better decisions, it gives you the ability to do things and make choices you otherwise didn't have. And I know this because we went through, you know, a bit of a rough period the last couple of years, and I wasn't able to invest in the things that I wanted to at the time. And you had people going, invest in yourself. And you're like, Well, I literally can't at the moment. And you have other choices on the table, other choices that other people may not have to make. And hereon lies the nuance. But as I said, people are craving more. You can see it in the rise of boycotting unethical brands. We saw them boycott Target, they're boycotting McDonald's and Starbucks, they're boycotting, and you know what? Disney, massive$4 billion loss in like 24 hours because of you know their alignment with dropping Jimmy Kimmel affair. But it's the people have power. It's slower living moments, resale markets, it's conscious consumption, in-person connection, people choosing alignment over accumulation. So culture is shifting, but we're in that awkward adolescence period, you know, halfway out of overconsumption, but not fully sure what's next. And we're kind of shifting into the next era. It's like it really is. It's that's where we're at. And uh uh in alignment to that is the great wealth transfer. So the boomers will pass on up to 64 to 80 to, or is it something, it's something like that, trillion dollars with a T trillion dollars to millennials and Gen Z. Now, and they those generations think very, very differently, and with value differences is financial investment in different things, and I think we're gonna see some big changes, not only just with financial investments, but with choice. So you'll see, I think you'll see political realignment, which is interesting as well. So I think if you're going to be looking at this from the outside in and people going, oh, they're making the wrong choice, it's like, well, not really. When the young kids, and this you do totally off topic, but if you're talking about behavior and you're wondering why the crime rate goes up, there's a very similar alignment to why do you think people are going to do things like crime, Melbourne crime we've seen go up drastically? It's because the younger kids have like no prospect of the future, nothing looks optimistic, everything's doom and gloom. And so they're like, what else have I got to use? By the way, this does not excuse their behavior. Don't think I'm one of those people that it's like, oh my god. But I also think that you know that there needs to be um a conversation around this, which is why I keep saying every time I I put my money somewhere or my my values when I'm voting, it's always fixed education and health first. Bang. And then someone's like, oh, but you need money for that. And it's like, yeah, well, you need a healthy society in order to make money. Like it's kind of and you put it in the way of a mortgage of a house mortgage. A house mortgage? What else do you get mortgage for? Red mortgage, right? You buy the house on a mortgage in most cases. I don't think anyone's just banging out, you know, a cash drop of 700k plus on a house, but you get a mortgage, and then you pay it off, and the interest compounds. It's the same thing. You go into debt to pay for the things that need to be fixed, the infrastructure, the systems to get the thing, and then it compounds. It's that's what it would do. I don't I don't understand. Anyway, there's that. That's my thought on it. But we're talking about brands now, right? So let's swing back ADHD, you know, scenic route. We need to talk about purpose-driven brands, because this is where it gets really messy, because there is no I guess there is no right answer. You don't get moral points for skipping Black Friday. You're not a corporate demon if you want to do it either. If you're a purpose-driven brand, every decision that you make is a message, including whether you show up at Brack Black F Brack at Black Friday or sit it out. I think that that's a really important thing to know. So, some questions to ask is what I would do. And that is, does participating align with your values? Does skipping it align with your finances? Do you or your customers rely on sales to afford your product? Are you using urgency or abusing urgency? And are you building trust or borrowing attention? So for some brands, opting out is the stance. Um, I saw this with one of our clients built furniture. Amazing. They did this off the back of what I wrote, and it was such a beautiful, let me pull it up. Instagram. It was actually great. I was like, this is it. And she was like, inspired. And I was like, no way. So um she posted her and her hubby. Where is it? Black Friday. And she did really well. She said, Black Friday. We're sitting this out. We don't mass produce or stack stock. We build from raw timber one piece at a time for homes where intention matters more than urgency codes. Our clients don't shop by countdown timer, they shop for longevity and belonging. If you know, you know. Fast future needs sales, workshop floor furniture doesn't. So if we're missing from the Black Friday lineup, it's because we're in the workshop crafting furniture with a story, not a barcode. In timber we trust. I was like, clap, clap, clap. Absolute gun response. Um, and that also doesn't, you know, she said felt very inspired by the you want and only pep talk. And I was like, yay, love that. But it's it's kind of like, what are your value set? So I won't participate in that, but I'm also a service-based business, so I don't really need to. Um but if we're looking at, you know, I don't judge anyone that does do it, and I think that it's almost like needed. It's almost I think that small business have a really hard place to be as well, because they can make a lot of money from it. And I think that, you know, if you can, do that. But if it cuts in, if you're feeling the pressure that you need to do something that you don't want to do, don't do it. And also just to FYI, Apple don't discount their stuff, and they had never have, and that has been a precedent forever, and it has maintained the quality of their brand. So that's a really important thing to think about is um some brands opting out is the stance that you need for others, offering a sale ensures that they survive, and we need the good businesses to survive because there is always nuance, you can't just it's not one case or the other. I'm not here shitting on people that are doing part of the Black Friday sale. I think you know, if you need to do it, you have to do it. And good business need money, and if you're doing good things, make that money, in my opinion. I'd rather them spend it with you than someone else. But if they're gonna get a sale and want it, go waste it with someone else. Do you know what I mean? Go to the corporations and cut into their bottom line. I guess the rule of thumb I would have is participate consciously, just don't do it because you feel you have to do it. And define urgency as an opportunity, not just panic. Or you can skip it entirely and just let trust compound because both are valid and you just need to be intentional about it. So, look, I'm a founder and a human who also enjoys buying nice things. And do not get me wrong, I've been looking at all of the sales as well. So my relationship with consumption has actually shifted massively. Do deals tempt me? Yes, of course. Um, but too many deals, like too often, actually cheapen the entire system. Because it trains consumers to wait, it kills general trade times and it creates an artificial buying season. So it's almost like there's so many sales on, you're just like, meh, I'll just wait till next time. And you will notice this with the change of behavior and the way people spend is almost it's almost like people wait, the end of financial year sales happen, and then people can hold their money most of the time, unless there's like a winter sale where they're getting rid of old stock, which is usually end of financial year anyway, but then you move into they all have a spring sale, maybe, but in most cases, people are holding on right up until now. So they're conserving their money and then they'll spend. So they go through a few quiet months, and then that's being fabricated now. So it's almost like it's forced consumers to not spend, and so no one spends, and so businesses will now have to go through this period where it goes really dark and then hit it at the end of the year. Anyway, that's just my thought post. You know, who am I? Who am I to judge? But I guess it trains consumers to wait, and it's like retailers are setting up psychological traps, and we're still falling into the dopamine. So these days I'm a little bit more intentional. Um I'll let my cart sit there for a little bit. I kind of fill my cart, and I'm like, do I do I do I really need this? Would I buy this full price? Like, do I need this? Do I value it? Or am I just responding to pressure? So the cool things that I've been buying at the moment is like back to school stuff for next year, like school shoes and things. But honestly, most of the time the answer is no. And it's I like you end up buying shit that you don't need, you end up getting all these things come through, and you're like, why did I even buy that for? So where do we land? I look, I'm not here nor there, but Black Friday isn't the villain, honestly. Um, it's just a lens and a and a focus point for us to be, I guess, observing our own behavior before we naturally fall into a cycle, which I think might be too late. But it's a way to look at how we like as a pe as people and as brands as a culture respond to pressure, urgency, and value. Because if you're a founder, strategist, marketer, or just in general, an honest, you know, curious human being, I guess ask yourself what is what is it that my brand is teaching people to value, or what is it that the brand is teaching people to value? Because that's the real work. Is it teaching urgency, intention, consumption, or meaning, pressure, or trust? Because each decision, I guess, is a lesson. And each I guess the Black Friday just makes that lesson louder. It's like a real magnifier. So look at the end of the day, like there is no response to this, but I did put this out on LinkedIn as a share, and I did a reel on this last week. And obviously, there's more nuance to it. I can't just go this is bad. All I'm saying is that this is when these small things start, and we become we become really what's the right word? Overwhelmed, overstimulated. It's like we're consuming for the sake of consuming and we're missing the thing that is truly going to make us happy. I think it's like it everything here, which is what I want to talk about this month, is an idea, essentially an identity crisis. I think after COVID, everyone's gone through this big identity shift, and no one's aware of it yet. So yeah, I think um that's where we're at. And if this episode gave you something to think about, um, I'd love you to share it with a founder who feels torn about Black Friday or someone who just needs permission to slow down because that's one thing that I've taught myself this year is that the good things happened in the slow periods. And once I told myself that I didn't need to jump aboard the now, now, now things started to happen. So, full transparency, you want and only went through a really rough last couple of years, and the same thing, we went through a big shift, but you know, at the beginning of this year, I was really intentional about what I wanted from the business, and I stuck to that plan, and I stuck to that plan really well, and we are in like such a complete opposite position to what we were at the beginning of the year. Now I've got like almost four retainers on the book, which allows me to hire more staff, it's enabling me time back into the business. I'm able to be more intentional with what I'm posting and what I'm saying, and so more of that's going to be coming out. So hopefully I can challenge a few um a few assumptions out there. Um, but anyway, um, I try not to say um, but at the end of the day, who cares? Anyway, that's for today. Uh, if you have any questions or you would like to slip in with your opinion, I am always here to hear it. Let me know on uh your one and only's Instagram or on Tara Lad. I am Tara Lad on Instagram. I'm definitely over there often. Otherwise, I will chat to you soon. Did you like that episode? Hope so. Because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at you wanna only underscore AU on Instagram or head to www.youwananonly.com.au
