'PEOPLE BUY HOUSES THE SAME WAY THEY BUY SOCKS OR WASHING POWDER'

An ethnographer once told me this, and I think she was being controversial. Her theory was that people use the same kind of judgements (emotional and rational) when buying a house as they do when buying socks or washing powder.

However my own experience of buying a house is that there is a big 'aah' moment of emotional connection when you decide in your heart to buy it, but only a very little 'aah' with socks, or Persil etc. There is also a sense of drama when deciding on a house, that this is one of the more significant moments of your life, which you tend not to get with M&S pure cotton or Persil (unless you're the brand manager maybe).

But far more significant for me is the different mind state of being an active buyer vs a non buyer. I used not to buy anything at all if I could help it, but I've bought a lot in the past year. We've been doing up our house, so we've bought entire bedrooms, a whole kitchen, every kind of brand or appliance you can think of. Currently I'm trialling rugs, next it's TVs, then garden furniture and so on.

I think that being a buyer is a mentality. It's like a job. You explore the market, find out the leading brands, make your choice, find the best place to buy then wham, on to the next purchase. And yes, there is an 'aah' moment of emotional connection, faintly reprised in gradually decreasing waves whenever you look at the thing over the next few weeks/ months.

Being a buyer is like being hungry. You are looking to buy, you are actively scanning the market or the fixture, it's not a question of whether you will buy into the category just which brand you will choose. You get annoyed if you can't find what you want. And if you are not a buyer it's like not being hungry where any 'interruption' with offers of food just make you irritated.

All of which confirms my first instinct: that advertising and communications focused on people currently looking to buy from that category (narrow cast) is likely to be more effective and the role of broadcast is to direct us buyers to where we can find out more. We're in the market, so help us complete.

Dominic