KFC Blind Box Package Accused of Inducing Excessive Food Consumption Why did "Happy Water" let blind box babies steal the limelight?

According to the "News Hyperlink" of the Voice of China of the Central Radio and Television Corporation, recently, the fast food brand KFC launched a set of joint blind box packages - buy fast food packages to get a blind box doll. Some consumers hire people to buy and eat on behalf of blind boxes. This does not exclude that some people will directly discard the food that cannot be eaten.

In this regard, the China Consumers Association issued a document saying that KFC as a catering enterprise, its fast food is a limited period of use of goods, usually consumers will not over-purchase, with a limited edition of blind box sales, is to stimulate consumption by "hunger marketing" means, and easy to lead to consumers due to over-purchase caused by unnecessary food waste.

(Source: China Consumer Association Pipe Network)

It can be said that nowadays we are no longer unfamiliar with goods such as "blind boxes", or rather, this kind of sales methods. Which nerve does the blind box, whose mystery has faded, trap us? In the blind box consumption of the "buy the pearl and return the pearl", can the "happy water" in the fast food package not give people the happiness brought by the blind box?

The charm of uncertainty

Buy a set menu to send toys, and fast food brands did just that twenty years ago. However, at that time, they usually launched one per week on a regular basis. Consumers eat once a week for several weeks in a row, and they can basically put together a complete set. Such a rule, put into the present, is probably "a nostalgic past".

Because, the rules of the blind box appear: the road of effort is long, and the probability is decided.

Nowadays, people can say that they have figured out the routine of the blind box, but why is it still being routined by the blind box?

Tang Yicheng, executive deputy director of the Beijing Zhongke Science Mental Health Promotion Center, explained that human beings are always curious about the unknown, and this sense of curiosity about the unknown is called the "Pandora Effect". How attractive is the unknown? Even if it is a bad result, for example, the blind box is repeated, or the one they don't want is drawn, it will not reduce people's desire to explore, and they want to see what is next opened.

Tang Yicheng introduced that some scientists have used brain scanning technology to find that when people do not know what is going to happen, the striatum of the brain will become active, and the active striatum will motivate people to explore the outside world and expect that this exploration will be rewarded and rewarded. And the outcome, good or bad, does not affect the desire for this kind of exploration.

Although the probability of drawing "hidden money" is not high, the experience of occasionally getting a "hidden money" is unforgettable, Tang Yicheng pointed out that the "intermittent reinforcement" caused by this uncertainty is a good reward and encouragement, which has a reinforcing effect on repeated decision-making.

Psychologist Skinner did an animal experiment in his early years: randomizing the number of times a rat needs to get food by a control lever—a rat may press 1 time to get food, or it may need to press 40 times to get food. Skinner compares fixed-scale to irregular gap rewards. It was found that with irregular reward intervals, it took the longest to eliminate existing behaviors.

That is to say, the non-fixed interval reinforcement makes people's expectations of "hidden" blind boxes difficult to fade.

"Happy water" can't beat the blind box baby?

In the blind box package of the fast food brand, the package itself that should have taken the protagonist's script itself, as a high-calorie meal, was also a pleasing role in the past that mastered the "happy code", but now it was robbed of the limelight by the gift.

From the perspective of consumer psychology, the process of eating fried chicken and drinking Coke is a functional consumption - buying food to fill the hunger. Buying a blind box is a kind of self-pleasing consumption, and the functional purpose is not clear, just to please yourself. Tang Yicheng said that in psychology, the so-called functional consumption has an upper limit, and the desire to eat enough will disappear, while the spiritual demand for self-pleasing consumption has no upper limit. Therefore, people may be able to delight themselves by constantly buying packages to get giveaway blind boxes.

Some people think that buying a blind box is an impulse consumption. However, some consumers buy "substitute eating" services in order to get blind boxes, and some people go to this store to try again, and it seems that it is not an impulse to invest in such efforts. From the perspective of consumer psychology, the so-called impulse consumption is an instant purchase behavior - buying useless things with emotions and impulses, while painstakingly obtaining blind boxes is more in line with compulsive shopping.

It's not impulsive, but it's also irrational.

Tang Yicheng pointed out in the Voice of China's "News Hyperlink" that the mental health risks hidden in forced shopping are more alarming than impulse consumption: "Our survey statistics show that 1 in 10 people will be a compulsive shopper. While, to some extent, this is not serious enough to affect our social functioning, situations that include a lot of debt and intimate relationship breakdowns may be associated with forced shopping. ”

When the blind box is tied to fast food with a serving period, in addition to a bunch of dolls with duplicate styles, there is also a possibility of food waste due to over-purchase. At this point, people may need some modest guilt.

Tang Yicheng pointed out that moderate guilt can make people feel compensatory behavior, and the next time they may choose not to waste or consume in a more economical and rational behavior model: "In fact, moderate guilt is a beneficial emotion. ”

Producer: Liang Yue

Reporter: Liu Fei

Editors: Yang Yang, Marus