How Customers Come to Think of a Product as an Extension of Themselves

Businesses are constantly vying to capture the attention of potential customers. It’s not easy to do. People are inundated with different brands as they stroll through the streets, scan through their social media newsfeeds, and binge television. The average American is exposed to more than 4,000 ads every day.

A simple concept can help businesses cut through the noise. It’s called psychological ownership. That’s when consumers feel so invested in a product that it becomes an extension of themselves.

Companies that encourage psychological ownership can entice customers to buy more products, at higher prices, and even to willingly promote those products among their friends. But if businesses disrespect this feeling, sales can suffer.

To build psychological ownership, companies must use at least one of three factors: control, investment of self, and intimate knowledge.

Enhancing customer control

One way is to allow customers a hand in forming the product. Consider Threadless, the t-shirt company. Founded in 2000, the online firm allows users to submit t-shirt designs and vote on the best ones. Threadless prints and sells the winners.

This model has been extremely successful. By 2006, the company received 150 T-shirt designs per day and had over 400,000 users voting on shirts. That year, the company sold 60,000 t-shirts per month and boasted a profit margin of 35 %—much higher than many traditional clothing retailers.

Touch also generates a sense of control. Consumers are more likely to buy something if they handle the product first.

That’s easy for brick-and-mortar stores. But in an increasingly digital world, businesses have to get creative. Nordstrom, for example, allows customers to select clothing they’re interested in online and pick a store to try them on. When the customer arrives, the clothes are ready in the dressing room.

Encouraging “investment of self”

Businesses should strive to make products customizable. When consumers can personalize products, they buy more and are happy to recommend those products to friends.

Take Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke”campaign. The company’s total volume of soft drinks sold had fallen for 11 years straight. So Coke decided to sell bottles and cans labeled with hundreds of common names. And consumers were invited to request their own customized cans. Sales turned around, rising 2.5 percent in just 12 weeks.

Or consider Great Britain’s tourism campaign. The nation’s tourist authority, VisitBritain, invited Chinese residents to name classic British landmarks in Chinese. They submitted more than 13,000 names and voted on their favorites. The seaside resort Blackpool, for example, was named “A place that is happy to visit” and the famous shopping street Savile Row was named “custom-made rich people street.” Then VisitBritain used these names on social media and websites. The number of Chinese visitors to the United Kingdom increased 27 percent.

Building intimate knowledge

This occurs when customers believe they know every facet of a product or brand so well that they have a special, unique relationship with it. Think about a friend who claims to “discover” a band because they knew about it before any of their peers. Or someone who waits in line for hours for the next iPhone because they want to get it first.

Businesses can cultivate this feeling in many ways. REI—an outdoor supplies company—sells inexpensive co-op memberships, and members enjoy members-only sales, free classes, even in-store “garage sales” of returned merchandise. Realtors offer customers virtual reality tours of hard-to-visit homes, with the additional option to virtually customize a home they are considering. Both of these tactics should elicit feelings of ownership.

The dangers of psychological ownership

Star Wars fans are notorious for their psychological ownership of a film franchise they know intimately. Recently, a group of these fans even launched a campaign to entirely remake the latest sequel—The Last Jedi—because they disliked what it did with “their” brand. The general resentment towards the film showed at the box office; the movie’s sales fell about $200 million short of several Wall Street analysts’ predictions.

As the irate Star Wars fans show, once companies cultivate psychological ownership, they need to respect it. Psychological owners can get defensive—even territorial —about “their” brands.

Tropicana found this out in 2009, when it scrapped its iconic logo of a simple straw in an orange. The redesign turned off a generation of customers who had grown up with the image and felt ownership over the original design.

In less than two months, Tropicana’s sales plummeted 20%. Competitors’ sales increased by double-digits. Tropicana soon went back to its original design.

Opportunities abound for companies to inspire psychological ownership. A furniture store could encourage customers to assemble—with staff assistance, as needed—a small piece of furniture when they first walk into the store. The feeling of accomplishment upon successfully building something would instill a sense of ownership early in the purchase process. Likewise, enticing people to control a product by moving it around on a touch screen would increase online shoppers’ feelings of ownership. Even an animal shelter, by inviting people to submit names online for shelter animals, could get more people to adopt pets!

Companies legally own their brand, but their most devoted customers may own it psychologically. Businesses should cultivate this feeling—and then respect it.