The Good Life or The Goods Life – what people buy?

Do we buy goods or pieces of happiness? To get to its answer, we have to dig into psychology. Today’s topic is how mar-keters are using psychology in their field of work. Now I know what you’re thinking. I know, I know, it can be boring. But trust me, there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Psychology itself is a broad topic to discuss. So, today the main topic to focus is “Positive Psychology and how it’s used in the business and marketing field”. Nowadays, people are more concerned about their mental health, especially after the pandemic.

Not only in houses or educational institutes but also in working places, huge and impactful changes are made. At times, people are more focused in happiness rather than the goods while buying. In recent years, the application of positive psy-chology in the workplace has gained significant attention among business leaders and psychologists. Positive psychology is considered as the ‘Happy Psychology’. The psychologists, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who are often con-sidered the founders of the positive psychology field, define it as “the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels that include the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life”.

It tries to add facilitators to well-being. Seligman theorizes five “pillars” of well-being in what he calls the PERMA (Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment) model (Seligman, 2018). In a related theory, Seligman suggests that life satisfaction is the result of three types of “happy lives” (Seligman, 2008):

The Pleasant Life: A life characterized by as much positive emotion as possible. Certain skills, such as savouring and mind-fulness, can amplify these emotions and contribute to the Pleasant Life.

The Life of Engagement: Identifying your highest strengths and recraft your life to use them as much as possible.

The Meaningful Life: Finding greater meaning by using your strengths to belong to, and in the service of, something larger than yourself.

As we know how positive psychology works, now it’s time to get into it through a marketing point of view. To get to the objectives of the positive psychology, we can say that it encourages a positive work environment. When employees experi-ence positive emotions and feel a sense of well-being, they are more likely to be creative, innovative and more committed to their work which means more engagement on a personal level. It is applied to improve employee engagement, produc-tivity and performance. Research has shown that when employees are happy, they are less likely to quit the job and take fewer sick leaves. It helps to build resilience as well which is a key element of the pleasant life. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, adapt to change and having a positive outlook to all the challenges. So, a nice working envi-ronment develops the resilience they need to cope up with stress and adversity.

Not only as an employee, nowadays a nice working environment of a company also attracts a customer’s attention. For example, recently a Bangladesh based software company “Ollyo” developed it’s working environment and posted pictures of it on Facebook and within few hours it reached millions of people and it was in the “Popular now” segment of Facebook. People who didn’t even know that this company existed before this or people who were not interested in this sector – it reached them as well. That’s how positive psychology works as an important aspect of the field of marketing.

People get more intrigued by seeing the word ‘happy’ or anything related to it. That’s where the marketers do their job. See, marketing isn’t just about creating a catchy slogan or a nice ad. It’s about understanding how people think, feel and behave and using that knowledge to create messages that resonates with the audience. Big companies have been using positive psychology since ages. Like Coca-Cola had a slogan once “Open Happiness”, the title of the Disneyland is “The Happiest Place on Earth” and also Hershey’s uses the tagline “Hershey’s Makes S’more Happiness”. It strikes the buyer’s mind and makes them feel a sense of happiness through it. People who want their stress to lessen are more inclined to this type of products.

Mindfulness is a key-term of positive psychology as well. Applying this construct to a marketing perspective means redirect-ing to a value-based approach from a product-oriented approach to create brand loyalty by establishing long term impacts on customers. It is a reconfigured model to entice customers through greater cognizance and empathy according to study about positive psychology in marketing : a study from Indian Marketing Context. The Grameenphone is a great Bangladeshi example mindful of marketing, apart from it’s telecommunication company, it supported the economic and social empow-erment of rural empowerment in the country through their ads. There’s also Brac Bank which has a social responsibility program called “360 degree CSR” which includes initiatives such as donating a portion of it’s profit to education, health and environmental causes. Bkash is also not lacking behind in mindful marketing. It has a CSR program that donates a propor-tion of its profit to support disaster relief efforts.

As a very newly introduced sector of psychology, positive psychology has a lot to offer. Mental health is a very important and discussed sector. People here in Bangladesh are also becoming aware of the importance of mental health. There are some disastrous effect of Pandemic in our mental health. So now, it’s high time we use positive psychology in our business-es as well. Not only it will encourage buyers to buy products which will serve them a sense of happiness, but also it will give them the employees or workers a good, pleasant life. We can also spread awareness about how important mental health is to lead a good life.

In conclusion, the application of happy psychology in the workplace is a promising approach to make a significant differ-ence in the lives of the employees and the success of the business as well at terms of work, production and sales as well. I think in Bangladesh, we should also use positive psychology for a better mental health outlook and societal impact.

The writer is a student, Department of Marketing Jahangirnagar University. She can be contacted at [email protected]