The rational mind is the humble servant, the intuitive mind the faithful gift. We have created a society that honors the servant, and has forgotten the gift.
—Albert Einstein
IN THE SUMMER OF 1957 IN THE NEW YORK CITY SUBURB OF Fort Lee, New Jersey, a polio scare frightened residents away from public swimming pools. Wary of what might be lurking in the pools and looking for ways to escape the heat of the afternoon sun, they headed in droves to the air-conditioned comfort of the darkened Lee Theater to watch Picnic, starring William Holden and Kim Novak. Looming behind the scenes, market researcher James McDonald Vicary was conducting an unusual experiment, one that he hoped would be a boon to consumers and advertisers.1
During the film, words were repeatedly flashed on the silver screen for 1/3,000th of a second, urging moviegoers to “eat popcorn” and suggesting they “drink Coca-Cola.” Vicary contended that these “invisible commercials,” which were shown so rapidly that viewers couldn’t actually see them, allowed for more entertainment time and eliminated bothersome ads. He maintained that his innovation also saved advertisers the money and resources required to produce regular commercials. Over the course of six weeks 45,000 people visited the theater, and the results surprised even Vicary. Purchases of popcorn soared by an astonishing 57.5 percent and sales of Coca-Cola jumped an impressive 18.1 percent.2
On September 16, 1957, Advertising Age unveiled Vicary’s secret weapon of subliminal projection, reporting plans to extend the idea to television viewers. But the naïve market researcher was taken aback when the findings of his experiment ignited widespread public outrage and paranoia about ill-intentioned possibilities. The ensuing mass hysteria would later find him unlisting his phone number and shunning public appearances in fear for his life. That very same year also saw the introduction of Vance Packard’s highly influential book The Hidden Persuaders. The book’s central thesis was that we were being monitored and manipulated by marketers and advertisers without our conscious awareness.3 A year later, a government investigation by the CIA led to a ban on these subliminal cuts in the United States. The reports concluded that: “Certain individuals can at certain times and under certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness of the influence.”4 Fortunately, the public was now not only aware of the real dangers of subliminal advertising but could also rest assured knowing that laws were in place to protect them from corporate mind control. Except there was one problem: The experiment was a hoax. Vicary admitted to the fraudulence in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age, saying that the original market research study was “a gimmick” and indicating that the amount of data was “too small to be meaningful.”5 But the damage had been done and the urban legend lived on. Even to this day some people remain concerned about hidden messages and images in ads. But embedding a phallic symbol in a cluster of foliage or a naked body in a pool of water is not really a good way to make anyone buy liquor, cigarettes, or anything else for that matter.
The word “subliminal” comes from the Latin roots “sub” meaning “below,” and “limen” meaning “threshold,” referring to perception that happens below the threshold of consciousness.6 And even though a failed and deceitful market research study over half a century ago had the entire nation barking up the wrong tree, we now know, with a certain ironic twist, a disturbing truth that has profound implications for both consumers and companies. Most of the business of life happens below the threshold of consciousness. And while we were so worried that others might be controlling our minds, what we really should be wondering about is whether we ourselves are ever in control.
We are living a delusion. We think the conscious or rational mind is in control because it’s the part of our mind that talks to us, the voice inside our heads as we silently read the words on this page. Because we believe that this part of our mind is running the show, we also believe that the conscious minds of consumers must similarly be driving behavior. For marketers, this leads to a false pretense that purchase behavior is a conscious choice, but, science shows, the exact opposite is true.
In 2008 startling evidence to support belief in the role of the unconscious in decision making was demonstrated in an experiment by a group of scientists led by John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. Using brain scans, these researchers were able to predict participants’ decisions about seven seconds before the subjects had consciously made the decisions. As the researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience on April 13, 2008, “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.”
The decision studied was a simple choice of whether or not to push a button with one’s left or right hand. Participants were free to make the decision whenever they wanted, but had to indicate at what point they made the decision in their mind. By observing micropatterns of brain activity, the researchers were able to predict the subjects’ choices before they were “known” to the participants themselves. “Your decisions are strongly prepared by the brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done,” says Haynes.7
This unprecedented prediction of a free decision raises profound questions about the nature of free will and conscious choice. For decades marketers have been talking to themselves instead of speaking to the real desires and motivations of consumers. They have been rationalizing the effectiveness of the wrong marketing tools aimed at the wrong target and the wrong mind. It’s not their fault. They were unconscious of their own delusion.
Think of the human mind as if it were an iceberg. Just the tip is visible, or “conscious,” while the vast majority lies concealed from perception, or “unconscious.” Most of our thoughts, beliefs, and even our decisions occur without our own awareness. Marketers need to go deeper to really understand the true nature of our behavioral causes. Fortunately, science is now plumbing these depths at a revolutionary pace and, in turn, illuminating mysteries that have long eluded us. Below the surface is where our intuitive, emotional, and unconscious mind hides. This is the part of our mind that drives almost all of our behavior.
Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He understood the power and importance of the unconscious mind, developing the theory of relativity by imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. The neuropsychological technique called dissociation enables us to look at a problem from a different perspective by getting outside of our own head. Einstein embraced the “mysterious,” saying, “It is the source of all true art and science.” He probably could have predicted the neuroscience revolution of today!
Einstein’s greatest gift was his inordinate ability to make the leap beyond imagination to create what others couldn’t see—by integrating conscious, logical thought with unconscious, intuitive insight. He lived not just above the surface of the iceberg but also in the part not visible to the eye, pulling from the depths of his intuition to guide his research and theories. By honoring the whole of the iceberg, we too can help revolutionize our understanding of how markets behave.
Today you’ll find evidence of what Einstein referenced as the forgotten gift of our intuitive mind in the language, tools, and metrics of marketers.
One of the greatest ironies is that “awareness” has always been the gold standard for guiding and measuring campaign and brand success. Marketers spend a disproportionately large percentage of their primary research budgets evaluating and measuring brand, advertising, message, and product awareness. But the quantitative copy tests, concept tests, and advertising tracking studies that make up the majority of this evaluative research only skim the surface. They fail to recognize and understand the underlying unconscious causes that often evade awareness. One marketer who didn’t believe in consumer research was Steve Jobs. When a reporter once asked how much market research was conducted to guide Apple in the launch of the iPad, he famously quipped, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.” The iPad, according to some measures, would become the most successful consumer product introduction in history.8
Our brains experience and know more than our minds can ever possibly report. Self-reported data in market research surveys simply can’t measure the implicit, nondeclarative memories that unconsciously prime our brains’ receptivity to brands and messages. These memories are complex sets of neurological associations that lie deep in the brains’ emotional systems and become anchored to the brand but hidden from view. When researchers try to investigate brand affinity and loyalty, they often find themselves recording the conscious relationship one has with the brand, not the deeper, intuitive connections formed over a lifetime.
For instance, when someone is presented with the option of a Coke instead of a Pepsi, autobiographical memories and culturally learned associations are being fired deep within the brain—outside the awareness of the would-be soda buyer. These associations link a present brand stimulus with experiences from the past. This personal “data” is summarized in consciousness as a feeling. But consumers usually cannot consciously access most of these thoughts or the origins of their emotions.
The real answers exist in the domain of the unconscious, emotional mind, a part of the brain that speaks in feelings, not words. The unconscious mind is like a device that has recorded all of the data of all of your life’s events. If the unconscious could talk, it would perhaps ramble illogically and boundlessly. It would conjure up all the deep imprints, episodes, thoughts, emotions, and associations spanning one’s entire life, the sum total of which would represent the true value of the brand. The list would go on and on and on, filled with episodic memories and autobiographical life events that, while no longer easily accessible by the conscious mind, remain stored in the vast memory banks of the intuitive mind.9
When asked about preference in market research surveys, the respondents most often post-rationalize and make up evidence, offering up some logical reasoning that seems plausible. Our conscious minds are designed to think up stories to try to explain and make meaning of the hidden forces and hardwired neural programs that guide our behavior. “I prefer Coke because I like the taste better,” they say, and that is the so-called factual response that is coded and entered into the data table and reported in the key findings of the report. Some marketers would look at that data and develop advertising about a great-tasting carbonated beverage. Fortunately for Coca-Cola, their marketers have not gone down this path, and Coca-Cola has their market share dominance to show for it.
Coke’s focus has always been establishing an instantly recognizable and appreciated brand. Through the classic, consistent logo, the iconic contour of the bottle’s design, the mellifluous alliteration of the brand name, its investment in world-class, heart-warming advertising, and a pervasive retail presence, it became not only the first truly global brand but also the most recognized trademark in the world.10 In 2011 the Coca-Cola brand was worth an estimated 74 billion—more than Budweiser, Pepsi, Starbucks, and Red Bull combined—a position maintained by spending 2.9 billion in advertising in 2010, more than Microsoft and Apple’s advertising budgets put together.11
For years, we have lived under the adage “advertising must be single-minded,” but this reasoning is fundamentally flawed: there is an inherent “duality” to the structure of our minds. Influence is born by appealing to the emotions while overcoming rational restraints. This conflict between unconscious emotionality and conscious rationality creates the opportunity for effective brand promises. When the mind accepts a brand story as told in advertising and marketing communications, it is both believing the story’s rational tenets and bonding to its emotional meaning.
Before marketers develop strategies they start with a description of the target as a single person, typically called “a persona,” which is based upon traditional self-reported research. This individual, often described along current cultural, product, category, and media usage dimensions, represents a discrete demographic and psychographic segment of a population. But by focusing on how this persona is different from the rest, we ignore the universal similarities: the human insights that we share, regardless of gender, age, income, geography, or culture, and that also prompt our actions. Knowing that someone is a 35- to 44-year-old loyal owner of a domestic sedan who indexes high on watching reality TV, claims to work out two plus times a week, says that reliability is the number one reason they choose to buy a particular car, and lives in Midwestern America neglects that person’s deeper, more meaningful, universal human desires and aspirations.
Once when I was conducting focus groups, I asked a cross section of cost-conscious compact sedan owners who had just seen the redesigned Jetta, “What would your friends think of you if they saw you driving this new car?” They responded defiantly, saying things like “I don’t care about what others think of me, I just want to get from point A to point B!” Shortly thereafter, these same panelists were shown several concepts to describe the new Jetta and asked which they preferred. “I like Head-Turning Good Looks!” they concurred.
Their “persona” had fabricated a smart, responsible image, but deep down they really desired recognition and attention. The irony is that if we fall for their self-deceiving trap, they won’t be happy and neither will Volkswagen. We arrived at a strategy that afforded them a level of sophistication that they had always wanted at an attainable price, and an ad campaign summarized by the expression: “Great. For the Price of Good.” This effort helped the new Jetta attain its best sales year ever in the United States.12 Both minds were satisfied, and their conflict resolved by conferring status and not just promising practicality. Deep down each and every one of us wants a little more social status. If you are the exception to this rule, you are most likely lying . . . to yourself.
But marketers often get so caught up in the outward cultural expressions of the persona, they ignore the humanity that binds us all. Ironically, psychologist Carl Jung coined the term “persona” to describe the façade designed by people to make an impression on others while concealing their true nature! The persona plays an important evolutionary role in human behavior, helping us to adapt to our cultural group, to fit in with and be accepted by others. This has aided us in our survival for many thousands of years, and still does so today. It is this social mask that each of us wears to shield and conceal our authentic yet more vulnerable inner self.
The persona is the mask of overconfidence that invents stories to color reality in our own favor. This creates a dilemma for market researchers. For instance, in survey research, 95 percent of professors report that they are above average teachers, 96 percent of college students say they have above average social skills, and when Time magazine surveyed people in the United States and asked “are you in the top 1 percent of earners?” 19 percent of Americans indicated that they are in the top 1 percent of earners!13 Social science experiments reveal that people are inherently self-righteous and consistently over-rate their abilities, contributions, generosity, and autonomy. We chalk up success to skill and failures to bad luck. We say that advertising does not influence us, even though the data says otherwise. We swear that our partners take out the garbage less than we do, even though it’s really about the same. Our beliefs distort our realities, and we are programmed by our very nature to look out for number one. People even maintain these self-serving delusions when they are wired to a lie detector, which means they are lying to themselves and not intentionally to the experimenters!14 And, we do this as an adaptive function, to lead better lives and to insulate ourselves from depression. In fact, people who lie to themselves tend to be happier and more successful in life and business.15
The persona shows up to focus groups and filters one’s responses in a manner acceptable to fellow panelists, modifying opinions in deference to authority. People are intimidated by the moderator, who is strategically and symbolically positioned at the head of the table, or they are influenced by the know-it-all panelist who hijacks the discussion in an effort to impress the group. Like a chameleon adapting to the requirements of the environment, the persona is the part of one’s identity that often yields to groupthink while concealing deeper personal thoughts, the thoughts that make up the dark mass of the iceberg below.
Suspicious of the unknown, the persona is wary of the faceless, nameless observers behind the two-way mirrors. I recall an incident when I was conducting an in-depth interview about perceptions of mortgage lenders with a subprime home mortgage loan candidate in Los Angeles. The man believed that his bank had secretly arranged the so-called research interview as part of his approval process. Needless to say, it was almost impossible to break through his paranoid defense shield. Despite my constant reassurance to the contrary, he kept up the self-serving image of financial responsibility. Quite frankly, I don’t blame him. What is more important, getting your home mortgage loan approved or giving your opinion about an annoying online banner or a piece of junk mail?
If people present themselves differently from who they are and believe their own lies and confabulations, we need to find out how to go deeper to reach their truer selves. As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we don’t know.”16 The “inner self” is a term Jung used to describe the totality of the psyche that includes our deeper, more unconscious desires and intentions, or in essence, “the real you.” The self and its hidden intentions is where the actual truth and opportunity lie for marketers.
A group of ten people sit in a brightly lit room. The fluorescent lights above feel more appropriate for an interrogation space. They shift in their seats, unsure of the questions they will be asked, and appear uneasy about offering the “right” responses. One of them taps his fingers annoyingly on the conference room table they are all situated around, a sound picked up by the not-so-cleverly concealed microphones. Cameras are recording the session through the mirrored glass that separates them from hidden observers. The group watches as someone emerges from the back room, passing a suspicious note to the moderator who has just joined them, as a giant two-way mirror looms in the background. The participants in this focus group laugh and talk nervously, sometimes avoiding eye contact as the session begins. This environment practically demands that their inauthentic personas be on display and that their more intimate “real selves” be kept concealed from the superficial scenario they are in.
Is it reasonable to expect deeper, more emotional and deeply personal responses in such a contrived and clinical environment? If consumers can lie to themselves, wouldn’t they just as easily lie to moderators in a focus group setting? Certainly. This is why we must understand the “tells” of their lies.
Behind the glass in the back room, observers clack away at the keyboards like stenographers at a trial, recording evidence to support their own predispositions and confirmatory biases. Amidst the hours of dialogue and often contradictory reports, they pay attention and hang on to the content of the words, while ignoring the context, the part of communication that actually determines the meaning. The answers can be found not in the words themselves but in how they’re said and in what isn’t said. Instead of focusing on the words, we need to focus on the inner self of the person: the body language, the linguistic hints and slips, the intonation shifts, the micro facial expressions, and the behavioral incongruities that often belie the meaning of consciously reported behavior.
Ironically, qualitative research is the one place where we can really investigate what is going on below sea level. Being able to look into the eyes of consumers as well as to observe their bodily reactions is a distinct advantage over larger-scale quantitative surveys conducted by phone or the Internet. It is not just about whether a person says they prefer Coke or Pepsi, or one advertisement over another, it’s also about observing and analyzing how they respond to those choices.
But this can only happen with a highly skilled moderator practiced in the nuances of body language and the art of detecting subcommunication. Like psychologists and therapists—a skilled few—moderators must not accept the words of people on face value but seek the story behind the story. They know and can comprehend their panelists better than the panelists can even understand themselves. These moderators look for the meaning beyond the words. Though truly great moderators are rare indeed, they often succeed in using qualitative research in spite of the structure of the focus group, not because of it.
Professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA Albert Mehrabian conducted a study on human communication and found that 7 percent of a message was derived from the words, 38 percent from the intonation, and 55 percent from the facial expression or body language. It is only reasonable to conclude that a majority of communication is not captured in the words per se, the verbatim notes of the top-line report, or even the full one. How full can the report be if it is missing the majority of insights from the parts of the mind that guide behavior?
While quantitative surveys have more robust, stable, and projectable sample sizes, these tools, as currently structured, often fail to reach the deeper emotional unconscious. Because of the manner in which the data is obtained—the level of personal detachment and the inherent limitations of self-reported data—the findings are often reduced to what the participants are saying and not how they really feel. To make matters worse, a majority of current quantitative research is conducted online, allowing for anonymous feedback and a feeding ground for role-playing personas, if not carefully controlled.
Before we can develop better market research tools we need to first develop a better understanding of how the human brain works to change behavior. To do this we must first shift the focus to the unconscious.
As Einstein knew, the processing power of our unconscious mind is immensely more powerful than that of our conscious mind. Timothy Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of the book Strangers to Ourselves, indicates that our senses take in about 11 million bits of information every second, but we are only consciously aware of about 40 bits of that information! Which means the remainder of those 11 million bits of information is being processed without our ever knowing. Looking at the world through consciousness is like looking at life through a tiny keyhole17—our critical mind can perceive only a tiny sliver of the vastness of information that is being processed by our bodies and absorbed by our senses.
Not surprisingly, the dominant unconscious easily overrules our conscious side. To demonstrate this point, try a little experiment on your own. Sit in a chair and extend your dominant leg. With that leg, make small clockwise circles with your foot. While performing this motion, draw the number 6 in the air with the index finger of your dominant hand. What happened? Everyone who attempts this task usually has one of two reactions; their foot will either freeze in midair or reverse directions while the hand easily completes the task of drawing the number 6.
What’s going on here? Drawing the number 6 is an unconscious motor program. You have done it so many times in the past that you do it automatically without thinking. It is a learned behavior. Making a circle with your foot is a conscious activity that requires thought-focus and energy because it is not likely a behavior that has been previously learned. Instead, the learned behavior overrides our conscious effort. This happens throughout our lives more often than not. We defer to our autopilot learned responses, instead of adapting to a new process or pattern.18
But even though our powerful unconscious mind dominates, the conscious mind is actually the gateway to our unconscious. Repeated conscious activities and experiences are eventually turned into capable, hardwired intelligence deep within our brain, residing comfortably and effortlessly beyond our awareness. Much of what is ingrained in our unconscious minds, including the brands we know, love, and to which we are so loyal, began life in the conscious mind. Like drawing the number 6 over and over again in a penmanship exercise, or seeing ads over and over again on television, brands and their messages are now second nature to you. Over time, these lessons have become infused in our brains and bodies as learned behaviors.
The unconscious is the domain of our emotions—the feeling of good or bad that we assign to things. When Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” what he really meant was that “feeling” makes it so. Value judgments are made on the basis of emotions and feelings, not thinking or logic. When the waiter brings over a tray of desserts and your eyes fixate on the Belgian chocolate truffle cake, your emotional systems light up with the good feelings and memories of all things chocolate. Your rational mind tries to dissuade you, pointing to the facts that cake is fattening, high in calories, and unhealthy, but try as it might your logic falls victim to feelings of intense pleasure that assign value to the cake. Your brain values the feelings, not the facts.
Brands are like people. The value you assign to someone is based largely on how the individual makes you feel. For instance, your natural attraction to mates and partners is driven by unconscious emotions, decision rules that have already made the choice for you. It happens at a deeper level. Throughout millions of years of evolution your brain has become preprogrammed with preferences for characteristics like tall men or curvy women. There’s nothing you can do to consciously change that. That’s why you can’t logically convince yourself to fall in love with someone when there simply isn’t any chemistry. No amount of reasoning will change how you feel because feelings weigh in before and irrespective of logic and conscious choice.
When we go to the local market, we find that the brands we buy are the same from week to week. Though a specific offer or coupon might tempt us to contemplate All detergent if we are a Tide loyalist, we will most likely walk out of the store with our preferred brand. Emotions not only make judgments, they also generate automatic physical reactions. They determine Crest vs. Colgate, Toyota vs. Honda, Nike vs. Adidas, blondes vs. brunettes, and short vs. tall. Our emotions drive preference, choice, satisfaction, and loyalty, determining what products are chosen from the shelf and which people and activities we engage with in life.
The unconscious, quite literally, runs the body. It controls all of our sensory perception and the myriad continuous bodily functions that thankfully go off unnoticed and without a hitch. Right now, the unconscious is keeping your balance, instructing your heart to beat, commanding your lungs to breathe, growing your hair and nails, replacing the cells in your body, and removing toxins from your bloodstream. It not only constantly monitors your internal state but also what’s happening around you, always alert for potential threats and opportunities such as predators, food sources, and mating partners.19
The main goal of our unconscious minds is self-preservation, the survival and replication of our genes and selves. It is the home of our natural instincts and learned habits, those repetitive behaviors that include the loyalty to a product or brand.
Think of the unconscious mind as a vast repository of all our past experiences and lessons learned, as well as the natural instincts that our forebears have taught us through the instruction of the information encoded in our DNA. Many of these memories are referred to as implicit or nondeclarative memories since we no longer can explicitly recall them, like the feeling of a cold Coke on a hot summer day in fifth grade. In all of our behavioral responses we automatically and often unknowingly reference these learned and innate impressions. In essence, we are never really living in the present alone. We are always making largely unconscious comparisons to our past in order to predict what will happen in the future.
Unlike the conscious mind, which is linear in thought, focusing more on single tasking and logical facts, the unconscious mind is holistic, highly perceptive, and multisensory. It is constantly multi-tasking and parallel processing many levels of information. For example, the conscious mind hears the words coming out of someone’s mouth, but the unconscious mind takes into account the inferences, the credibility, and authority of the speaker, the extent to which that person is aligned in their words with their deeds and actions, the feelings and associations evoked by their presence, and the judgments and reactions of others.
The unconscious responds to the context or structure of a message not just the actual content, aware of how the information is delivered and not just what is said. As the advertising great Bill Bernbach once said, “Telling isn’t selling.”20 Because of this, the best ways to reach the unconscious parts of our minds often involve embedding the message in structural devices that evoke emotion and require internal, personal, and divergent interpretation. This is why we use stories, poems, songs, jokes, pictures, symbols, characters, roles, and metaphors. They are particularly ripe marketing tools, effectively bypassing critical analysis to evoke feelings that strike at the heart and gut. They speak to that deep and powerful unconscious, the man behind the curtain to whom we normally pay no attention.
To begin to really understand the definition and role of a brand in the lives of consumers, we need better research tools. Thankfully, neuroscience is beginning to provide some.
Neurobiological evidence of how branding actually works was brought to light in a seminal study done by a team of pioneering neuroscientists led by Read Montague, director of the Brown Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine. This study took the marketing tactic known as the Pepsi Challenge into the laboratory.
In the famous Pepsi Challenge, most people prefer the taste of Pepsi in blind taste tests, that is, when they don’t know which brand they are drinking. Yet Coke is still purchased more often by the majority of cola drinkers in the real world. How does one reconcile these observations? How can one brand be preferred in taste and the other preferred in purchase? It seems only logical that we buy beverages that taste better.
To answer these questions the team of neuroscientists set out to repeat the experiment of the Pepsi Challenge with a new twist. Volunteers would drink the beverages while having their brains scanned with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine, a harmless, noninvasive approach to visually observe the mind, that is, the brain in action. This scanning technology works by demonstrating the dynamic flow of blood in the brain, thus signaling what parts and functions of the brain are being activated.
To accomplish this, participants were placed in an fMRI machine and the beverages were delivered through carefully designed strawlike tubes. In the first part of the experiment they would be unaware of the brands they tasted, replicating the design of the Pepsi Challenge. In the second phase of the experiment, volunteers would be exposed to an image of the can of Pepsi or Coke prior to receiving each drink to determine the effect of brand knowledge on preference and brain activity.
When the participants were aware of the brand, they stated a greater preference for Coke and brain scan imagery revealed significant differences in neurological activity. When the test was “blinded” and they were unaware of what brand they were drinking, preference levels and neurological responses for Coke and Pepsi were similar.
But when those tested expected Coke, there was significantly greater activation of the frontal area of the brain called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in decision making, working memory, associations, and higher cognitive thinking. The prefrontal cortex is also involved with our personality and our perception of self. Additionally, there was also greater activation within parts of the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain, and the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory.21
As Montague puts it, “there is a huge effect of the Coke label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up of memories, and things that involve self-image.”22 This experiment demonstrated that when exposed first to an image of the Coke label, participants thought about the brand via the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that plans behavior.
Humans plan future behavior by relating present experiences to memories, past experiences, and learned associations. In other words, brands reside in our brains and not just our culture. They activate unconscious thoughts and beliefs. As Montague concludes, “We live in a sea of cultural messages. Everybody has heard of messages, and in the case of Coke, those messages have insinuated themselves in our nervous system. There is a response in the brain which leads to a behavioral effect—in this case personal preference.”23
Decision making is about making predictions, and our brain does this largely through the release of dopamine. This “gimme more” neurotransmitter is responsible for wanting, craving, and motivating us to do nearly everything, including sex, drugs, gambling, playing video games, and even shopping. The dopamine system also has a close relationship with the opioid system of the brain, which produces pleasurable sensations. “You’re probably 99.9 percent unaware of dopamine release,” says Montague, “But you’re probably 99.9 percent driven by the information and emotions it conveys to other parts of the brain.”24 Dopamine also plays a key role in memory because it is one of the neurotransmitters that controls brain plasticity and learning.25
Merely seeing the Coke label was enough to activate the brain’s pleasure centers without even taking a sip, by elevating the levels of dopamine, a naturally occurring chemical produced by the brain that signals feelings of reward.26 There is a dopamine link between the prefrontal cortex and the pleasure systems in our brain. The way we plan future behavior is based upon present feelings: The more rewarding it feels, the more likely we are to engage in that activity.
Dopamine is also the feel good “drug” of anticipation. We do not need to experience the product to get the rush of dopamine. We only need to imagine and anticipate it in our minds by activating our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that lets us envision future possibilities. Montague’s team used magnetic resonance imaging of the brain to fairly accurately predict participants’ preferences before they would even take a sip! “We were stunned by how easy this was,” Montague said. “I could tell what they were going to do by looking at their brain scans.”27
On a logical, side-by-side product comparison, people might prefer Pepsi, but brand preference has very little to do with rationality. Dopamine is also the chemical responsible for making value judgments that guide decisions. This choice just “feels better” than the other choice. Preference and enjoyment of Coke is derived from not just the sweet taste but more so the “sweet” anticipatory emotions. Marketers are in the business of selling what it means to “feel good.” We love the brand, not just the sugary, effervescent liquid.
Clear historical reminders of the emotional (not rational) nature of brand preference are the failures of Crystal Pepsi and Coke Clear. These introductions sparked a marketing fad in the early 1990s, an attempt to link purity with the new colorless beverages. Rational consumers would choose the product without the artificial brown coloring, and opt for the purer clearer cola, right? After all, caramel coloring occurs when you burn sugar, and any biologist will tell you that burnt sugar is actually a carcinogen.28
As it turns out, our unconscious minds prefer the brown shade because this brand property is strongly steeped in our memories of the brand. Without the rich, brown coloring it just doesn’t seem like the Coke that we have always enjoyed. Instead, the beverage feels like an imposter, lacking the positive emotional valence we have come to associate with its caramel hue. The color colors our experience, not just the soda. In fact, it doesn’t even taste the same because our beliefs about what we are drinking change our actual experience and our perception of taste.
To demonstrate this effect of visual perception and expectation on taste, a group of experimenters at the University of Bordeaux in France gave 54 professional wine tasters white wine that had been colored with a tasteless, odorless red dye. When asked to describe the wine all of these experts described the white wine using terminology typically used to describe red wine. Even the most astute connoisseurs can be duped by their own brain chemistry. Whether you are an everyday consumer of cola or an expert in tasting wine, your unconscious mind is processing information on parallel tracks, at many levels and with many senses. Often it can create meaning when there is none, creating a real experience based on a false illusion.29 As co-founder of the field of evolutionary psychology John Tooby explains, “All sorts of things that we think are matters of the external world are in fact these matrix programs playing in our heads and structuring the world for us. And there really is an external world and it corresponds sometimes to some of these elements, but we’re lost in this video game that we mistake for reality.”30
Brands are subjective, not objective, experiences. They are symbols that signal expectations of outcomes based upon our past beliefs and impressions. The color of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s golden arches, the scent of Tide—these are brand properties anchored in our past experiences. These sensory cues trigger unconscious memories, thoughts, patterns, and experiences that are manifested in consciousness as feelings sensed by the body. This conscious output is our brain’s way of summarizing unconscious information. Emotions inform our interpretation and guide future behavior, prompting our motivation to buy before we even become aware of them. Neuroscientist David Eagleman likens the conscious mind to that of a newspaper, “by the time you read a mental headline, the important action has already transpired, the deals are done.”31
Brands are learned behaviors: unconscious automatic intelligence acquired through experience. Learned behaviors are conditioned responses that have been internalized. They simplify our lives by generating choices and action without requiring us to think.
When the brain is overwhelmed with thought—often triggered by outside stimuli—it is forced to juggle more balls than it is capable of juggling. Classical studies in experimental psychology have confirmed the limitations of our conscious working memory at about seven units (plus or minus two), which is why there are seven digits in a phone or license plate number.32 Currently, our brains are exposed to far too much information each day to consciously process all of our decisions.
Metabolically speaking, conscious thought also requires significantly more energy. This is why too much mental activity makes us tired, inducing us to crave high energy, sugary snacks and caffeine as ways to help us pay attention and maintain clear thinking. Instead of working overtime to consciously process these outside influences, it’s much easier and efficient to let the automatic feelings and responses do the thinking for us. It’s like using a calculator instead of having to figure out the math, or programming your car’s navigation system instead of having to read directions. We end up taking the easy route, the path of least resistance. And brands are the road signs we follow. They are judgmental heuristics—or mental shortcuts—allowing us to respond without significant thought or energy. This not only brings us enjoyment and pleasure in the brands we choose but also relief from confusion and effort in the process of purchasing them.
Neuromarketing is a new field of market research that promises to quite literally get inside our heads. These market research studies explore consumer response to marketing stimuli by using techniques such as EEG (electroencephalogram) brain sensors, fMRI brain imaging, and galvanic skin response (measuring stress responses through changes in skin moisture). A primary goal of this research is to narrow the “say” versus “do” gap, the divide between what people say they feel and how they really feel. The number of neuromarketing companies has risen from only a handful a few years ago to about a hundred worldwide today.33 While this technology promises to deliver much needed insight into the unconscious, it is still very much in the nascent and exploratory stages.
But measuring brain responses is already helping marketers break through the shield of the persona and get at the real feelings of consumers. Frito-Lay chief marketing officer Ann Mukherjee says brain imaging tests can be more accurate than focus groups. This technology helped to evaluate a Cheetos television spot, an ad that featured a woman who takes revenge on a laundromat patron by putting the orange-colored cheese snacks in her dryer full of white clothes. In focus groups, panelists expressed socially acceptable disapproval for the prank and dislike for the ad because it was too mean-spirited. But brain tests revealed that the women actually loved the commercial; our inner selves are not as politically correct as our personas. The marketer chose to air the spot, which seems like solid reasoning since likability is generally a good thing and there is evidence to suggest that it correlates with persuasion. The ad can be a mediating variable: I like the ad therefore I like the brand.34
But is this really or always the right approach? There are instances when likability doesn’t translate into sales success. The dotcom era yielded some of the funniest, most entertaining, and likable ads but generated abysmal business results. Most notably, the beloved pets.com sock puppet (a dog mascot with button eyes, flailing arms, and a microphone in his paw) gained widespread popularity and cultlike status. The puppet appeared in Super Bowl ads and as a guest on Good Morning, America, was interviewed by People magazine, and there was even a giant balloon in his image at the 1999 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But that was not enough to save the company from liquidation less than a year after its IPO.35
And there are instances when unlikable ads worked exceptionally well. Anyone who lived in the environs of New York City in the 1980s will likely recall the very effective psychopathic rants of Crazy Eddie, the electronic retailer whose “prices [were] insane!” His irritating diatribes annoyed millions of television viewers but helped earn the 43-store chain more than 300 million in sales at its peak, despite Crazy Eddie’s later fiscal problems.36
In addition, evoking an emotion that entertains is not the same as generating a desired buying response. Marketers are not aiming to entertain; they ultimately want the prospective consumer to consider the product, not just laugh at the commercial. When choosing the right health insurance company, do I want to feel amused or charmed, or do I want to feel secure and safe? And not all emotional responses need to be positive. As a behavior change therapist, I have learned that negative emotions, like anger, outrage, disgust, hatred, fear, and dread, can be some of the most powerful ways to rally someone into action.
People are hardwired to avoid pain more than to seek pleasure. The fight-or-flight response, for example, is perhaps the deepest, most highly ingrained behavioral pattern in human evolution because it keeps us out of harm’s way. The brain often learns on the basis of painful emotions. It is said: “We suffer our way into wisdom.” When we touch a hot stove, we learn very quickly not to do it again. And it’s often the sting of losing that best teaches us how to win. The twin pillars of pain and pleasure motivate all behavior and there are instances when employing either or both can work well in marketing.37
The brain is too complex to find a magic bullet. For instance, the amygdala, a part of the brain that controls anger and hate, is also responsible for lust and attraction.38 There is no single buy button in the brain. Describing brain response in a laboratory setting is far from explaining how those neural responses will impact behavior in the real world and how they can inspire actionable marketing solutions.
Good insights in the wrong hands can lead to bad advertising. For example, according to NeuroFocus, a leading neuromarketing company, placing images on the left and copy on the right helps the brain process this information faster. This is because items in the left field are processed by the right frontal lobe of the brain, which processes images, and items in the right field are processed by the left frontal lobe, which processes language. This very insightful observation is especially helpful in designing optimal user experiences. But if every marketer applied this insight as a rule to all advertising, everything would eventually look similar and nothing would stand out.39
The brain, much like the humans it commands, is inherently paradoxical and conflicted. Establishing sets of rules or making bombastic claims is destined for failure and will hinder inspired thinking and creativity, the engine that drives marketing innovation and success. When we design products, packages, advertisements, communications, displays, websites, and marketing experiences all by the same set of rules, even if they are rooted in how the brain processes such experiences, the outcome will be a sea of sameness, the death knell of any brand.
The fact of the matter is that anyone can do neuromarketing without ever scanning a single brain. I’m not suggesting we ignore the possibilities of testing marketing materials with brain scanners, sensors, and biometrics. These technologies offer intriguing, exciting possibilities and promise, but they should also be approached with guarded optimism. We are only at the edge of what promises to be deep and meaningful research, and this process will evolve as we learn more about the mysteries of our brain.
My objective is to provide you with an actionable framework that can help marketers today as well as inform the development of neuromarketing in the future. As the evolutionary behavioral scientist and marketing professor Gad Saad argues with regard to the rapidly emerging fields of neurobusiness: “The neuroimaging paradigm will largely remain a fishing expedition for pretty brain images as long as no organizing theoretical framework exists to guide the research and provide coherence to the otherwise disjointed findings.”40
There is nothing in the world more complicated and humbling than trying to solve the mysteries of the human brain. We need tools, not rules. We need a system that puts these insights into perspective . . . one that explains the full spectrum of behavioral change influences from multiple angles, considering the process that the unconscious and conscious minds undergo when forming beliefs, evaluating choices, and purchasing brands. From there, we will be able to encourage divergent thinking and novel solutions.
As W. Edwards Deming, the world’s foremost authority on quality control management, once said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” Deming, an American statistician and consultant, was responsible for revolutionizing postwar Japan’s industries and reviving the Ford Motor Company in the 1980s. At the heart of his 14-point management philosophy to transform an organization was this principle: “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”41 In order to improve the marketing process, we need to first shift the focus from within the walls of companies and unveil the process of behavior change within the depths of the minds of people.
While the brain may be a noun, the mind and behavior are verbs. You can’t put the mind or behavior into a basket or a shopping cart because it is a process. And how the brain processes behavior change is like any other process. Much like baking bread, there are key steps that must be accomplished in a specific sequence. If you use the wrong ingredients and mix them together in the wrong order, you don’t get bread and you don’t get a change in behavior. Once the sequence and structure are uncovered, they can be guided, measured, and adjusted accordingly. When you uncover the unconscious processes of the mind, you can observe it in full awareness and strategize the most effective ways to modify behavior. You can then conduct actionable, effective market research because you know where to measure by making the unconscious conscious.
It’s like the story about an old boilermaker who was hired to fix the steam engine of a giant ship. After listening to the engineer’s description of the problem, he asked a few questions and then checked out the boiler room. Carefully inspecting the maze of twisting pipes, he listened closely to the hissing and thumping sounds, occasionally feeling the pipes with his hands. He then reached into his tool bag, grabbed a small hammer, and tapped once on a valve as the boiler system lurched back into perfect action. A week later the steamship owner received a bill for 1,000. The ship owner complained because the boilermaker barely did anything and spent a mere fifteen minutes of his time fixing it. When the owner asked to see an itemized bill, this is what the repairman sent him:
Tapping with hammer: |
$ .50 |
Knowing where to tap: |
$999.50 |
Total: |
1,000.00 |
It’s important to make an effort, but knowing where to focus your resources makes all the difference. By knowing where to tap, we can dislodge chunks of the iceberg and float them up to the surface to be examined in full view. As Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”42
Without conscious awareness of the process, sequence, and structure of the largely unconscious nature of the mind, you are much like a blind watchmaker—a term that British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used to describe the accidental nature of natural selection and evolution. Or, in marketing parlance you are just “throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.” Your outcomes and results are largely happenstance, lacking direction, focus, and the effectiveness necessary to compete in today’s marketplace.
Every day, we wake up wearing two hats: marketer and consumer. We sell ourselves at work, we sell our products in the market, and we participate as consumers practically every minute of our lives. We can do that unconsciously, failing to see the powerful mind at work behind all of our choices and actions, or we can understand why and, more importantly, how we really make the decisions to do the things that we do.