142. Why We Love the Things We Love with Aaron Ahuvia

Here's Where It Gets Interesting

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Sharon spends time speaking with Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, who is an expert on a specific kind of love: our love of things–things like places, objects, brands, and activities. The things we love tend to be part of our own identity: perhaps a part of our childhood, or something we spend a lot of time with. Aaron advocates for using our particular loves–poker, PEZ dispensers, sneakers, water sports–in leading us to others who share our common interests, and can be a catalyst in forging interpersonal relationships. But what makes us really love something? There’s a difference between finding value in an object or activity and really loving it. Ahuvia says one of three things needs to happen for us to feel a connection with a thing: the thing itself is anthropomorphic, or it connects us to another person, or it’s a part of our own identity. This fascinating discussion will have you wondering just why you love the things you love!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome. Always happy to have you. Today I am sharing a
0:05.4	conversation with Professor Erin Ahuvia. And let me tell you the reason I wanted
0:10.1	to have him on the show. He is a new book coming out called The Things We Love.
0:14.5	How are passions, connect us and make us who we are. And you guys know that I
0:20.8	have a passion for variety of different kinds of animals, whales, owls,
0:25.1	eagles, etc. And it really piqued my curiosity about how the things we love
0:31.2	connect us and make us who we are. This is just a fascinating conversation. And I
0:37.5	can't wait to share it with you. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome
0:42.2	to the Sharon Says So Podcast. I am really excited to share today with Professor
0:49.4	Erin Ahuvia who is written a very interesting book that I think a lot of you
0:53.5	are going to find really interesting too. Thank you so much for coming. It's
0:57.0	my pleasure to say so much for the opportunity. Oh, tell everybody a little bit
1:01.0	more about your background. And I would love to hear the origin story of your
1:07.0	book. So I'm a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Dearborn
1:12.4	campus. And the book is about the psychology of love, but a very particular type of
1:19.2	love, which is when people love objects or activities or brands or places or
1:26.2	all that stuff that except people. And I've been working on this for a long
1:31.2	time. I started doing this research when I was a PhD student, which was back
1:36.7	right around 1990. And at that time I took a course from a very famous marketing
1:43.8	professor at Northwestern, where I was getting my PhD, a man named Philip Kotler.
1:48.1	He was explaining to us that marketing is everything. If you're a religious
1:54.3	congregation is sort of marketing itself when it gets adherence and
	...

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