After you buy your home or move into your apartment, much of what you buy to fill it isn't really necessary, but a fix of faux emotional satisfaction, an addiction retailers target to get you to buy even more stuff you don't need.

"For today's consumers satisfying their emotional needs and desires is just as compelling as satisfying their physical needs," says Pamela N. Danziger, founder and president of Unity Marketing a Stevens, PA consulting firm for the consumer product industry.

Danziger's new book "Why People Buy Things They Don't Need" (Paramount Market Publishing, Inc., $34.95) targets the industry with tips, but also provides insulting insight for consumers who want to get that discretionary spending monkey off their back.

Not being taken by the emotional buttons retailers push is particularly crucial when moving into a new home leaves little discretionary money to spend.

Danziger says consumers are largely emotional sponges seeking instant gratification. The pragmatic, rational approach to a better quality of life is dull, boring and much too time consuming. Marketers can easily win them over with verve, vibrancy, vitality and sex appeal.

Danziger recommends marketers and retailers move beyond sapient messages and pushing rational features and benefits of products and services and instead focus on the emotional satisfactions that really drive consumer spending.

"Brands with life and vibrancy that really speak to the consumer, do so on an emotional plane," she says. "By uncovering the interior emotional life of the consumer you can devise marketing strategies, competitively position products and craft persuasive advertising messages," says Danziger.

It works.

Two thirds of the nation's $10 trillion economy -- $6.6 trillion -- is consumer spending and more and more often it's discretionary spending, to the tune of $3 trillion.

Danziger says consumers spend far less on basic necessities including food, clothing and shelter today than they did 25 to 50 years ago because they give themselves "permission" to buy by stacking rationally based justifiers in favor of the purchase.

Consumers tell themselves the purchase will improve their quality of life, it will give them pleasure, beautify their home, make them more relaxed, provide entertainment and relieve stress, among more than a dozen "justifiers" consumers cop to in order to give themselves the illusion they are acting rationally in the purchase.

In reality, however, they are driven by desire.

Tap into that desire and you can sell them just about anything, says Danziger.

Self-made multi-millionaire Ron "Chop-O-Matic" Popeil, founder of Ronco Inventions, knows the drill...er...grill.

His inventions have changes lives.

The Showtime Rotisserie Grill is his latest invention and the star of infomercials that hawk "it has changed my life" -- a refrain typically uttered by those who obviously had none.

"The infomercial is a tutorial in marketing and selling utilitarian products that nobody really needs," writes Danziger.

Still, millions of Ronco gadgets sell every year.

"Through a simple presentation of information, supported with demonstrations and testimonials from audience members, Ron repeatedly drives home his message that owning the Showtime Grill will truly transform your life, not just the way you cook chicken," Danziger writes.

Similar marketing success stories abound in the most popular categories of products people buy but don't need, including audio-video tapes and disks, books, magazines and newsletters, greeting cards and personal stationery, personal care products and candles -- yes, candles.

No candle maker can hold a candle to Yankee Candle because the company isn't really selling candles. It's selling homes that smell good.

"We have built the brand around the importance of fragrance in the home. Home fragrance is what resonates with the consumer. Fragrance is the emotional bond that links Yankee Candle with consumers and its what brings them back again and again to our brand," says Yankee CEO Craig Rydin.

The business nearly tripled from 1996's $115 million in sales to $339 million in sales in 2000 and 2001 sales were running 13 percent ahead of 200, according to "Why People Buy".

The message Danziger's book holds for consumers?

You'll need those fragrant candles to mask the odor of rotisserie grilling.

Published: August 2, 2002

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.