JTBD: why people buy

August 25, 2024

All problems comes from some emotions like frustrations, anger, sadness, guilt
Emotions help to think to highlight a problem, to move you attention towards something, so you can fix it.
Emotions give energy to act.
90% of decisions are automatic

Internal narrator is a conflict resolution mechanism or a consensus protocol. It stitches the pieces of really when something is done in a conflict and explains why it is ok. “I decided not to drink BUT today is ok because it was a tough day.”
- This reminds how LLM works they predict w
- Brain predict future and uses senses to correct its predictions. When something is not going at it was predicted it generates signals to correct it though “pain”, pleasure OR lies. It reminds me of LLMs with their hallucinations and predictions of next character they need to produce.
Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote a book How Emotions Are Made where she explains how brain constantly hallucinate of future, lies, and use emotions to correct human behavior.

The brain acts like an investor, it observes the available options and tries to invest effort/resources in things which more likely will give higher-return.
The brain tries to reduce costs which is associated with “pain” centers in the brain and increase the reward which is associated with “pain”. See: Neural Predictor of Purchases Purchase == (pleasure from purchase - “pain” of losing money) > 0
In the product management we have the same process persuasion of pleasure (positive emotions) and “pain” avoidance (negative emotions).
- It will be interesting to see if these mechanism can be used to improve kids performance at school by tweaking how much “pain” they get to receive a reward. Like doing less for the same reward, or doing the same amount but for higher reward.
- It is also interesting is there some level of “pain” which practically block the path forward. Could it be that kids are not doing something till the very last moment because only at the very last moment the negative impact of not doing something finally lower than effort of doing something.
- Or how can we use it in other aspects of our life?

![[Consistency-Theory.png.webp]]

Status is connected to the survivability of an individual. The high status, the low chance that the society, a tribe will reject to and you will die. So people sick for status bumps all the time. They also challenge the status of each other.
- status pushes sales up
- it would be interesting to see if the current deterioration of the public education and sexualization, objectivization of the society has something to do with the games of the status. Like you boost your status by showing how beautiful, and desirable you are. The cheapest way to increase the status especially among youth.

motions help to realize problems, and act to correct them. Negative emotions appear when there is a threat to the basic needs. Listen to them.
dopamine help to memorized good and correct bad behavior. can be tricked by short pleasures and lead to addictions.
the brain uses consciousness as a conflict resolution protocol which deal with incorrect predictions at the consciousness level. It also estimates where to invest available resources.

Books on the topic: [[Reading list#Why people buy]]