We are rational creatures and we don’t like to waste our time on what’s not important.
This may be exemplified, right now, by your scanning the first, maybe second paragraph, of this article before deciding whether or not to read the rest. You might be more inclined to read this if you actually know me, or my name, and even if I’ve been somewhat clever with my title to catch your attention, you’ll still quickly determine whether or not the body copy captures your interest.
You might be a little more interested in what I have to say if you see that one of your friend’s has actually “liked” or read my post. But this whole evaluation will take place so very quickly, you won’t even notice that you have done it. Yet you will have evaluated the value of your reading this against your most precious commodity, your time. Is this going to be worth your time …or not.
As a marketer, I know my goal is to improve the productivity of my marketing & advertising efforts. I need to increase the number of profitable shares, to increase the amount that shoppers are prepared to pay for X product, and to increase the profit margin by reducing the cost of consumer acquisition/marketing cost per $1 of net revenue. Easy!
But is it? Loyal customers are great, but are they our most valuable? Maybe not. A hundred people buying my product once is more valuable to me than one person that loyally buys only my brand. Sure I like their loyalty, their ability to advocate on my behalf, and return to me. Heck, I’ll even give them a loyalty card to make them feel special. But my brand isn’t going to grow with Joe Schmoe buying my product; to grow my market share I want increased market penetration. My brand isn’t going to fail if Joe slows down on his buying my product, but it does hurt when I loose those fickle customers to something else because they look at the other brands in my category as if they were near perfect substitutes for each other. And that hurts!
We spend years and years working on gathering stats and facts about why one brand is different to another. But who cares? Virtually no one… A lot of the time, we (consumers) don’t even know why we choose one brand over another; we just want to know that it works. We don’t really know why we buy more or less of one product over another, but ask the question, and I’ll certainly try and come up with a good strong opinion as to the reason why.
But why?! Our subconscious brain makes about 90% of the decisions we make on a daily basis. And it is our behaviours that influence our attitudes. Consider the saying “Act as is” or “Act yourself in to thinking”. Once purchased, our brain will quite happily invest time and energy to justify our behaviour by the rational brain. Not that awareness or recognition alone means that we’ll buy a brand; of course we can be aware of a brand but never buy it. But FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and Loss Aversion will certainly be more likely to motive action.
Dating back to Aristotle’s view of the mind, it is wo/man’s ability to think and reason that sets us apart from beasts. Humans are rational creatures, with the supremacy of reason. Whilst Plato gave more credence to the emotional, referring to the Rational and Emotional as two horses in the brain, pulling in different directions, he considered emotions as dangerous and in need of controlling. Descarte also referred to the Mind/Body Split, but it is because Je pense, donc je suis, so our rational consciousness has remained key. But are we really that smart?!
Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute has authored several books shifting the focus on to the impact of the emotional brain as equally if not more in control of our behaviour that “rational” man has wanted to admit. Throughout evolution, emotion has functioned to allow living beings act smartly without having to thing smartly. In humans, reasoning does what emotions do but achieves it knowingly.
In his book, Descartes’ Error, Damasio used the Iowa Gambling task to demonstrate how emotion allows humans to “Act smartly without having to think smartly”. When faced with complex and conflicting choices, individuals are unable to decide using only cognitive processes. Somatic markers (feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust) are then engaged to help with the decision process.
Somatic markers simplify the decision process by directing attention towards more advantageous options. This overall state directs (biases) one’s decision of how to act and may occur covertly (unconsciously), or overtly (consciously), engaging higher cortical cognitive processing. Simply put, he demonstrates that the individual will, in the following order:
- feel something
- adjust our behavior accordingly
- explain afterwards why
But why is the brain so lazy? The brain consumes a huge amount of energy, so the less we use it the more it likes it. The less we have to think, the more automatic a behaviour comes, the more we like it, and the easier it is for us.
Our 5 senses are capable of absorbing 11 million bits of information per second, yet our conscious brain processes 40 bits of information per second. So over 99% of our brain’s work is subconscious…and yes, almost 95% of our purchases are determined subconsciously. And you thought you were making intelligent smart informed decisions!
As Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American psychologist, Nobel laureate, and author of ‘Thinking fast and slow’ (2011) said ”Humans are to independent thinking like cats are to swimming. We can do it when we have to, but we’d much rather not”. Kahneman identified simple biological truths about the way we buy and rationalize our purchase decisions based on the following premises:
- Our brains are inherently lazy things
- We don’t naturally like to think too hard about tasks and problems
- Our most significant purchase decisions are emotional, not rational
So for marketing purposes, Kahneman advocates keeping things simple when trying to sell. That doesn’t sound like rocket science… what’s the single most important thing you want to convey? Stick to it. Simple briefs are the best briefs. Faced with a multitude of inherently lazy brains, how do we make sure our messages rise to the top, be consciously acknowledged, and create the desired affect?
Understanding how the mind really works can give anyone in marketing a competitive advantage. But is marketing and advertising the transmitter of necessary information, helping the democratic populous be aware of all the product choices available to them in the free world, or is it actually a deceptive, duplicitous and underhanded. How subversive are the messages we are surrounded by on a daily, or hourly basis?
We spend our time thinking about creating strategies of desire, and how we can tap in to automatic behaviours. The world of inference and assumptions are wonderful for brain shortcuts. Building on Damasio and Kahneman’s theories, we can assume that the less the consumer has to think, the more automatic their behaviour comes, the more they like it, and the easier it is for them….and the easier it is for the marketer.
Brain Science is now helping to identify the implicit and explicit processes and triggers that impact marketing and decision-making. And we are discovering how deeply buried beliefs and assumptions are driving every decision we make. Brand awareness is good, but brand salience is critical to brands, and this distinction is the essence of branding.
Kahneman’s taked about the two systems of the brain. The unconscious portion is on duty twenty-four hours a day, every day of your life. It’s incredibly powerful. While the conscious brain loses focus every six to ten seconds, your unconscious brain never, ever loses focus, not once, not ever! So obviously, this is where all the action is located.
This is where everything from perception to habits, beliefs, behaviors, accomplishments and achievements take place. This is the seat of change that allows you to follow through with all of the activities that produce the intended outcomes concocted by the conscious mind, which defines, articulates, and establishes the basic direction.
SYSTEM 1
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SYSTEM 2
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Whether we call them Somatic markers, Cognitive Levers, Cognitive Bias Combinations, automatic behaviours, inference, assumptions, or Heuristic Cues these pathways within the brain evaluate decision making in a consistent, describable, yet irrational way. So targeting the subliminal mind, we can familiarize people with products, just by sheer share of voice (how many times did we hear Trump’s name on the airwaves during the campaign). Familiarity of information makes it more readily absorbed and accepted. And if a picture is worth 1000 words, a symbol is worth 1000 pictures. Planting images, symbols, sounds, or smells below the subconsious, all impacts behaviour and leads to ‘Predictive Programming’ where visual clues and symbols are encoded into all forms of art, film, media works, aimed to infiltrate large audiences (product placement in movies is a fine example of this). These images and symbols, subtly conveyed in encoded form, are all designed to influence the subconscious mind.
In the world of big data, we can assess and analysis and influence consumer behaviour more and more… for good, and for bad. From data crunching, we know that big brands have more customers than small brands, and that these customers are a little bit more loyal than they are to other brands (known as the Law of Double Jeopardy). Categories also share customers. However, the degree to which they share is influenced by brand size. For example, buyers of small brands are more likely to buy big brands; buyers of big brands are less likely to buy smaller brands (The Law of Duplication of Purchase). More buyers buy once, than those who five or more time, and there are a lot of light buyers, even amongst large brands (The Negative Binominal Distribution); and buyers change their buying propensities. Around 50% of heavy buyers remain heavy buyers; the others become medium, light or non-buyers. In addition, brand user profiles tend to reflect the category as a whole (vs. different types of buyers buy different brands).
So businesses or “Brand owners”, driven by quarterly profits, need to recruit more buyers to grow. Recruitment is key to maintenance and growth, but penetration is the most important metric. Loyalty metrics respond to changes in penetration, but loyalty does not drive penetration.
Brand Marketers only need three or four metrics, only one of which is brand specific, to understand the buying behaviour in a market, and the 100% loyal customers are not that valuable to brands – they are usually light buyers of the brand, and category.
Brands compete as direct substitutes for each other. DoP analysis show how brands compete for SIZE. And SIZE is a function of mental and physical availability, benefiting economies of scale that is the real driver of profitability.
This isn’t all to say that people don’t think about their purchases. There are a lot of times when we will investigate a purchase… when it has a high ticket price, when it is something that we care passionately about, or when you are in-front of the shelf looking at prices… and ‘Brands’ are an extension of our ego, our personality, our beliefs and how we want to be perceived. But it would be naïve to think that we are not being subconsciously swayed before we get to our conscious decision act.
Subconscious Attention comes before conscious recognition, and conscious recognition comes before cognitive evaluation. And the rational evaluation of messages is less important than we think. The distinctive Brand Assets are the essence of brand equity that have been established in our memory structures way before we are aware of it. And it is the distinctive brand assets, and memory association that increase sales and improves marketing productivity. Brands that are easier to recognize, will have increased brand preference, and they will be faster to find. This of course is the reason why you will find packaging looking so similar… The “I buy the green dog food… not sure what it is, but it’s got a green can!” syndrome.
Excellent, another revenue stream, this time for copyright lawyers! Distinctive Assets are legally protectable in many markets, so the color, the logo, the swirl, the name can all be trade marked. But there are some brand differentiators that can be easily copied by other brands/private label etc.
Visual Heuristic Cues help the brain cope with the information overload and to make it easier for us to make decisions. These cues are judgment-relevant “information shortcuts,” or “knowledge devices”. They are rules of thumb, educated guesses, stereotyping, profiling, common sense ideas that are stored in our implicit memories.
Auditory signals also help influence our behaviour. Marketing experts make use of the power of music extensively. In almost all commercials music is one of the key design elements. Again, the subconscious effects of music go un-noticed, yet when the music fits the product, it can increase marketing effectiveness by 20-30%. There is no rational messaging required with music; it is working purely on the emotional system. So when you are in the store, and there is some music being piped in to the food isle, or the wine area, check out if you’re listening to Indian music and putting indian food items in your basket, or listening to French music and putting French wine in to the basket! Article
In today’s world, there is an over supply of goods eg: Fast Fashion, off shoring. In fact we are drowning in material products. The charity shops can’t even keep up with the donations. We are exposed to marketing messages everywhere, anywhere and at any time of the day, and there is huge competition for our attention. With the quarterly cycle of Wall Street, and the need for more profits, the ideas of crop rotation, living with in your means, or only eating, wearing, buying what you need is long gone.
So when you think you’re in control of you’re decisions, think again. It may not be you at all!
Some additional reading:
This slideshare by Benjamine Pedrosa about neruomarketing is quite interesting.: http://www.slideshare.net/benjaminpedrosa/directed-study-neuromarketing
Unconscious Branding, How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing. Doug Van Praet:
“Consumers are not in control of their brand choices,” he writes. “Humans operate from two separate and often contentious cognitive systems and the mind that drives most of our behavior is ironically the one unbeknownst to ourselves.” Van Praet cites numerous studies showing that 95% of our thinking and most of our choosing occurs in our unconscious minds.
“As consumers,” he continues, “we make choices without understanding their foundations, and as marketers, we sell and brand products without understanding how to truly connect them to people. We are all playing a game, and we don’t even know how that game is being played.”
“Seducing the subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional influence in advertising” Robert Heath
“The anatomy of Humbug: How to think differently about advertising”. Paul Feldwick
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