What Sigmund Freud theorized at the beginning of the last century and represented as the deepest and most hidden part of our personality, is today being researched further and better understood thanks to the most updated and refined neuroimaging techniques.
Through psychological neuroscience, needs and desires from our subconscious that push us to make decisions allowing us to improve our life can be analysed and unveiled. In the field of Real Estate and interior design, this is shown in the precise moment when we decide to buy a new home.
There are a huge number of variables, physical and symbolical, that come into play of which we do not even have full consciousness and that indirectly influence our perception and evaluation of an environment. Undeniably, the senses have a predominant role: shapes, colours, materials, smells, and spaces overwhelm our senses every time we experience an environment, leading us to evaluate it and appreciate it based on our previous experiences and our individual characteristics.
Memories and emotions intertwine in a dense net of feelings that put us in relation with the environment that we choose to live in.
The Psychology of Living ™ format, developed combining psychology and architecture, starts from listening to and understanding the customer and their point of view, and becomes the heart of comprehension of the demand and supply dynamics in the Real Estate market.
Our preferences are the result of a complicated combination of cognitive factors that elaborate information coming from emotional and rational environments. In this precise and quick process, the most recently evolved part of our brain, the cortex, and the oldest composed of thalamic nuclei, get into the conversation.
Functional neuroimaging, the study of the hormonal and biological response, allows us to make this process visible and unveil, through more refined technologies, some of the most hidden secrets. An example of a practical application of these studies is neuromarketing: the need to communicate and effectively sell the product is this way supported not only by anthropology, psychology, and sociology, but also by scientific research carried out on the cognitive and neurological system of the client.
Real Estate marketing is not that different: through an understanding of mental processes the home environment can be planned and structured as well as its presentation to the public, for example, through Sensory Apartments and in showrooms capable of immerging the client in a virtual environment creating a one of a kind customer experience.
The goal is to actually understand what is at the basis of the audience’s psyche, to change the way companies work upstream and reach the market with a product tailored to the person. It is an energetic variation from the point of view of the players: the client cannot easily adapt themselves to the market, therefore it is the market that needs to adapt itself to the client and become “more human”.
The idea behind all this is a tailored product, whatever the nature, that needs to be adapted to the individual characteristics, increasing the demand for its affordability and keeping in mind the empathic connection that is created between the space and its inhabitant. Obviously, it is impossible to modify the client, their organism and even less their thoughts. It is necessary that the companies change, and study and understand how the client is an individual and not a number, a complex identity with a body and a mind, a personal history and culture, in a mix of rationality and emotion.
We are seeing all the effects of a great paradigm change for the Real Estate universe. During the last century we have seen the shift from a necessity to a housing solution, from minimal functionality to a living condition that tends towards anthropocentrism.
This fully mirrors the strategic model developed and suggested by the Psychology of Living ™: a vision that aspires to new logics and new tools, cooperating with a wide variety of professional figures, that are channelled back into the attempt of transforming the Real Estate market. The characteristics of the home can no longer be reduced to the mere distribution of spaces, to its planimetry and the price per square metre.
The house is a place full of meaning, emotions, and memories. The environment influences behaviour and the way of being and the feeling of human beings. The characteristics of housing, so buildings and by extension neighbourhoods and whole cities, can benefit the mental and physical state of citizens and reduce their negative stressors.
