We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.
—Sting
RECENTLY, I STOPPED AT MY LOCAL ROTISSERIE CHICKEN restaurant after a busy day at work. Just steps from my house in a beach city of greater Los Angeles; this is my idea of fast food. I pause for a moment on the sidewalk-facing side of the building to take in the brand new, imposing, and colorful promotional display painted proudly on the plate glass window. It boldly pronounces “Got Chicken?” Much to my simultaneous amusement and annoyance I think to myself, “Really? Can we be a little more original?” But despite my objections or anyone else’s, these self-serving adaptations of the virulent catchphrase show little evidence of abating nearly two decades after the famous “Got milk?” campaign was created by the talented Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco. What is it about certain ad messages that they seem to take on a life of their own? The answer lies in the base of our brain and the origins of our evolution.
In his book The Expression of the Emotions, Charles Darwin insisted that the brain grew and evolved naturally over time by gradually adding newer systems of neurons on top of the older ones to form the collective whole of the brain. In order to understand the human brain you have to take this evolutionary perspective, appreciating that the brain is the only organ in the body that exists in evolutionary layers. Derived from Darwin, this metaphor of the brain as archaeological sites buried from old to new presents a realm that needs to be carefully excavated and deeply mined to understand the true depths of humanity.1
In the 1960s neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who later became chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior for the National Institute of Mental Health, popularized this notion by proposing the highly influential triune brain theory, the idea that the brain is actually comprised of three distinct brains that evolved over time. These layers formed one on top of each other, and each brain has its own distinct drives and subjectivities. Nerves interconnect these three brains, which seem to operate as separate biological computers, simultaneously cooperating with or contradicting each other. These three brains form the three planes of consciousness from which we experience the world: the physical, the emotional, and the rational minds. MacLean’s three-part brain theory simplifies the brain’s design, but it remains a useful model for marketing applications.
The physical brain, which evolved first, is situated deep at the base of the skull, emerging from the spinal column. This part of the brain is the oldest and smallest remnant of our prehistoric past, and is often referred to as the reptilian brain because of its similarity to the brains of reptiles, which preceded mammals by roughly 200 million years.2
The physical brain, using sensory input, helps to monitor and physically respond to the environment, ensuring self-preservation and mobilizing the body when the fight-or-flight stress response is triggered.3
The physical brain is the domain of our natural instincts, our deepest ancestral memories that guide fundamental life functions, including many of our automatic behaviors. These habits and life-sustaining routines—such as breathing, circulation, digestion, sleeping, waking, eating, sexual reproduction, foraging, and hoarding food— are resistant to change because they are essential for our survival and bodily maintenance. The physical brain is designed for taking action, guided by the part of the brain we know as the cerebellum, which means little brain.4 This appears as a separate structure at the bottom of the brain below the cerebral hemispheres and is in charge of the coordination of bodily movement through sensory feedback, and the modulation of emotion.5 Because it lacks rationality and intellect, the physical brain has no ability to learn from experience, often repeating the same automatic patterns over and over without change, and generating behaviors that are impulsive, rigid, obsessive, and ritualistic.
Since it operates mostly out of fear and anger, the physical brain drives an anxious, paranoid, and often darker temperament, sometimes resulting in aggressive and even violent behavior. These response repertoires include territoriality, deception, prejudice, social dominance, pecking order behavior, status maintenance, awe for authority, and tendency to follow precedent.6 Though it is located at the bottom, or foundation, of the brain, and is completely unconscious, it still sits atop the motivational hierarchy, driving some of our strongest, most basic instincts and primal urges. In order to provide handles to marketers who seek to understand and tap into these powerful drives, I refer to them as the “Six S’s”: survival, safety, security, sustenance, sex, and status. A variation of these themes is what evolutionary biologists sometimes refer to as “the four F’s”: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fucking. If you ever happen to box out your space in a crowded elevator, get a little carried away in a friendly game or sport, become uncontrollably enraged by a careless motorist, crane your neck to get a better look at a horrible car crash, or simply crave a Krispy Kreme doughnut, your body is being commandeered by the survivalist instincts of your physical, reptilian brain.
In marketing, because the physical brain drives the unconscious need for survival and sustenance, it often gives way to the unwitting obsessive and repetitive inclination to spread advertising catch-phrases like “Got milk?” In the 1980s, the advertising agency Lowe and Partners discovered that the availability of food, even if it is simply a condiment, especially when coupled with a message of economic status, is able to drive a brand to widespread awareness and cultural interest. The campaign generated national attention when two British chauffeur-driven aristocrats politely shared a jar of the fancy mustard, punctuated by the phrase “Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?” and the tagline “One of life’s finer pleasures.” These physical drives are responsible for the endurance of other slogans, such as the tagline “Mmm . . . mmm good,” which helped Campbell’s become one of the world’s largest food companies, and for the infectious appeal of Life cereal’s famous “Mikey, he likes it!” commercials.
The physical brain also galvanizes our attention toward messages of security, which efforts such as American Express’s legendary “Don’t leave home without it” sentiment captured so perfectly, or Allstate Insurance’s long-standing claim of safety and confidence underscored by “You’re in good hands with Allstate.” And anyone alive in the late ’80s and early ’90s will likely remember the commercial for an obscure brand that worked the infamous cry “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” into the everyday American vernacular. This ad featured an old lady whose survival was jeopardized as she lay helplessly injured on the floor in her own home only to be saved by the Life Alert medical alarm, an approach the brand continues to use to this day.
The next neurological stratum to evolve was what MacLean called the “limbic system” or the emotional brain, which is also referred to as the paleomammalian brain. This emotional brain establishes bonds with people, tribes, groups, and brands, controls our emotions, memories, social bonding, and attachment. It includes key brain structures such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus, regulates involuntary nervous system functions that lie below consciousness, and acts as a control system that regulates homeostasis, the biological processes that maintain our life balance and stability, e.g., the regulation of our body temperature and blood pressure.
At the center of the limbic system lies the amygdala, a set of two almond-shaped structures that serve as the gateway to our emotions. The amygdala is poised deep in the brain and acts like an alarm, which in a nanosecond can set into motion programs of action, initiating the fight-or-flight response when needed. In the face of threat or adversity, the amygdala alerts the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates involuntary functions, which then commands the brainstem in the physical brain to spring into action.
The words “emotion” and “motivation” share the Latin root movere, meaning to move, which suggests that inherent in every emotion and every motivation exists the tendency to take action.7
It is the amygdala that imbues experiences with emotions, associating a feeling to a thing or event. For example, touching a hot stove connects painful feelings and emotions with the learned response to steer clear of hot stoves in the future. Likewise, it is also the amygdala that alerts people when they get burned by marketers who make false promises or fall short of expectations. This emotional sting causes customers to flee from the brand or in some instances fight back on the blogosphere or in the marketplace. But that sting also can be used to the advantage of advertisers through the tried and true problem-solution format of many effective ads that provide the means to move away from the “pain” toward the pleasure of the brand’s solution.
In conjunction with the adjacent hippocampus, the amygdala is responsible for learning through a process called associative memory.8 First, the hippocampus encodes the details and facts of an experience, converting information into long-term memory, and then the amygdala tags that event with a specific emotion. As the accomplished neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux illustrates, “The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing a face as that of our cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don’t really like her.”9 This two-part memory process in which the hippocampus gives rise to the cognitive representation and the amygdala gives rise to the emotional response seems to originate unconsciously. As LeDoux states, “These two things happen simultaneously, the amygdala memory is triggered unconsciously, you don’t have to be aware of the stimulus in order for that to be triggered. Hippocampal memory is probably triggered unconsciously as well, but you become aware of the memory when it’s triggered because that’s what a hippocampal memory does, it creates a representation of conscious experience.”10
This learning process demonstrates why brand or ad recall is not enough to change behavior. Marketers must not only engage the hippocampus to encode and recall the characteristics and facts about the brand and advertising message, but they also need to assign emotion in order to determine the brand’s utility and worth. The implications for marketers indicate the need for not only arresting visuals but also and perhaps more importantly stimulating emotions. The limbic system assigns value, sorting events as agreeable, disagreeable, or indifferent on the basis of past patterns of memory. For instance, the hippocampus recognizes the product as Coke from its iconic shape, red-and-white color scheme, cursive font and classic logo, but it’s the amygdala that tells you “I like Coke.” The emotions associated with the Coke brand determine that you will in fact “enjoy Coke,” thereby generating the behavior to choose that brand. This limbic system assigns value to objects, events, and experiences by attaching emotion, relating them to past memories, and in turn identifying patterns in our lives. This part of the brain is unconscious and involuntary, but at times we can gain conscious access to these emotions through feelings and physical sensations.
The emotional brain also determines what we choose to pay attention to. The more emotionally charged, the more likely your brand will stick out or break through the clutter, forcing people to notice your message. Emotional arousal occurs when our brains create vivid memories of a particular experience, establishing importance and attracting attention to environmental stimuli.11
If the movie Titanic made you cry, or you’ve enjoyed the joy of a reunion of family or friends, or have been moved by an old song, admired an inexplicably beautiful work of art, or simply felt the feeling of comfort in choosing a familiar brand or the excitement of trying a new one, your emotional brain has been activated deep within your central nervous system. In marketing, tapping into our limbic system results in some of the most effective and memorable ad campaigns. A study done by the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising analyzed the effectiveness of ads chosen from a large database of advertising award competition entrants and found that campaigns with primarily emotional content performed about twice as well as the approaches that focused on rational content.12
Emotion moves people to buy. Whether it’s how a toilet tissue in the UK linked their Andrex Puppy to our universal adoration for man’s best little friend, or how a brand of film captured the special, fleeting “Kodak moments” of life, or how the slogan “When you care enough to send the very best,” one of the most recognized and trusted lines in advertising, made Hallmark the largest manufacturer of greeting cards—when you lead with emotion, you often lead in the marketplace.
The most recent and outermost brain layer to develop is the neocortex or the rational brain. The neocortex is both the crown and crowning accomplishment of our brain’s evolution as well as the seat of our free will and conscious awareness. It is home to our higher cognitive functions such as language, speech, writing, problem solving, and analytical and mathematical thinking. The neocortex, also called the cerebral cortex (or cortex for short), consists of the commonly recognized wrinkly outer folds that are divided into the famous left and right hemispheres. The right brain is more spatial, artistic, and abstract and the left brain is more linear, rational, and verbal. While the emotional brain assigns value, the neocortex makes rational meaning of the feelings and emotions generated by the deeper, unconscious brain structures, attempting to explain the reasons and implications of why we feel a certain way.13
MacLean referred to the neocortex as “the mother of invention and the father of abstract thought.”14 This area of the brain includes the prefrontal cortex, the most advanced and evolved part of our brain, which uniquely distinguishes humans from all other species. The prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to plan behavior or create new possibilities, functioning like a mental simulator of different realities by giving us the capacity to imagine and anticipate the consequences of our actions in the future. The prefrontal cortex lets us know before we need to try it that a heavier-than-air flying machine is possible or that liver-flavored ice cream is a bad idea.
It also enables our ability for conscious reasoning and comparative analytical thought, which is illustrated by the self-talk that goes on inside our heads. It is that voice that deliberates “should I or shouldn’t I” as one peruses the aisles of a store. Because it lets us envision positive and negative outcomes, it gives us the ability to take voluntary action by making considered choices and guides our moral decisions, such as suppressing inappropriate physical urges. It also allows us to think twice before acting, applying the rational brakes of restraint before we lease a convertible BMW, spring for a 2,500 Gucci handbag, or polish off another tray of Godiva chocolates.
In addition, the prefrontal cortex is where the perception of self and identity is located, our conscious awareness of who we are. It is the part of the brain that recognizes the image in the mirror is actually you, and is the domain of our personality, identifying where we fit into the social hierarchy and how we express ourselves to the world around us.15
The rational brain might have come last in the evolution of our brain, but it is the most important part in terms of higher order thought. It makes sense and order of the world, rationally interprets things, and creates conscious subjective meaning of our feelings and unconscious responses. Though it is the crowning accomplishment, it is also less influential on many of our behaviors, and it is not always recruited or required for action.
When you are filling out a crossword puzzle, or comparing the facts on brand labels, or learning a language with Rosetta Stone, or deciding to skip the weekend trip to Vegas, you are actively engaging your neocortex or rational brain.16 We often engage the neocortex in marketing when we provide the audience with figures and facts like comparisons with other brands. While these logical facts per se may not be the primary drivers of motivation, they do serve an important role in giving oneself permission to act on our emotions and physical urges. Rational information therefore plays a secondary, but nonetheless important role in advertising and marketing. Having said that, there are times when rational approaches like a single-minded focus on price savings can work wonders for challenger brands that don’t own the emotional high ground of their established counterparts. As a strategy planner on the MCI (now Verizon) account at Euro RSCG in New York years ago, I observed firsthand how smart, rational efforts like “Five-cent Sundays” and “Friends and family,” an early type of loyalty program that offered savings to frequent callers, effectively challenged and greatly undermined AT&T’s monopoly. AT&T owned the comfort of being the dominant, familiar brand that facilitated social connection, but MCI laid claim to the importance of cost savings.
Through his important work and early hypothesis about what the triune brain might mean for human cognition and action, MacLean fundamentally changed the way we think about brain functions. Prior to his model, it had been assumed that the neocortex, the newest, rational part of the mind, dominated over the older brains in top-down fashion. But MacLean proposed that it was just the opposite. Often, the lower physical and emotional systems could hijack the higher rational brain from the bottom-up. In essence, our feeling brain serves as the primary driver of our behavior and the seat of our value judgments, while our rational mind acts as a backseat observer that more often than not goes along for the ride.17 We don’t really have free will but rather free won’t. We can apply the brakes of restraints to the forces of feeling, but we also can often fall short of stopping in time.
Have you ever struggled with a decision in which part of you felt one way and another part of you felt another? Perhaps you have experienced the powerful urge to indulge in a decadent slice of the aptly named devil’s food cake with sinfully rich cream filling. You were experiencing the competing conflicts of your three-part brain: the physical brain, which loves food because it knows that you can’t live without it; the emotional brain, which has learned so many past pleasurable emotions and memories involving cake; and lastly, the rational brain, which has its reasons for resisting but often succumbs to the urges and feelings of the other parts of the mind. Even though the rational brain understands the facts of the choice—that too much sugar, fat, and calories are unhealthy—all that matters is that eating cake is the quickest way to feel really good. Feeling trumps logic. Two out of your three brains have overruled your rational one. Similarly, have you ever jumped to buy something that was a bit too rich for your blood—perhaps a car, a handbag, a new watch, or a pair of athletic shoes? The decision was made long before you rationalized the benefits of the exorbitant price tag.
The adage “Life is short, eat dessert first” rings true because our brains are literally wired for short-term gain. And back in the Pleistocene era, lifespan was indeed shorter, in great part due to impending everyday hardships and threats. Short-term strategies kept us out of harm’s way, avoiding starvation, and ensuring our survival and the survival of our genes. We jumped from predators much as we avoid brands we don’t trust. Similarly, we leap today at the opportunity to overindulge in food or engage in sexual encounters as we did in the past. Response without thinking might have saved and produced lives in our foraging past, but today it can get us into a lot of trouble, and it has. The massive credit crisis, the snack food epidemic, the burgeoning pornography industry, and rising rates of teen pregnancy are the direct results of our “feeling brains’” (physical and emotional) abilities to hijack behavior.
Today neuroscientists are coming to understand that our brains are even more complex, intertwined, and conflicted than the triune-brain theory suggests. For instance, some neuroscientists believe that the concept of a limbic system is outdated, since brain imaging technologies have demonstrated that emotions tend not to exist in any single part of the brain for very long but are rather distributed throughout the brain. We also now know a linear view of the brain’s evolution as proposed by the triune brain model seems rather fanciful. In reality, the forces of evolution don’t just pile layer upon unchanged layer. Natural selection both modifies what it finds as well as works with what is there.18
But despite these sophisticated and complex processes, the brain remains an inelegant series of ad hoc solutions heaped like ice cream scoops over millions of years of evolutionary design. This intricate patchwork is not without its flaws, yet somehow it works, and it does so unfathomably well.19 MacLean’s three-part brain theory remains a powerful organizing theme to simplify the brain’s design, and is also a useful model with rich practical applications for marketers. Much as Freud’s suggestion that the three competing parts of the human psyche—the id, the ego, and the superego—had a vast effect on our culture and the climate of the times, MacLean’s suggestion of three competing biological layers of the brain has inspired scientists and laypeople alike, and can now help marketers, too, in better understanding how we buy.
All human experience, behavior, and brain function can be grouped into these simplified neurological buckets. On the deepest levels are the low road systems of the basal ganglia and cerebellum, the physical brain. In the middle lies the limbic or emotional system. And last is the neocortex, the high road of rational, deliberative thinking. This three-tiered approach is also a helpful metaphor and mnemonic for understanding the extent to which our behaviors are unconscious or conscious. The deeper or lower in the brain, the more unconscious the behavior.
Because our beliefs are formed largely on the basis of our past experiences, we can compartmentalize these dimensions of experience as threefold. In other words, our decisions, which are derived from our beliefs, are based upon: (1) the physical experiences of our body,
(2) the emotions and feelings of our heart, and (3) the rationalizations or logic of our head. Against these three planes of consciousness, we can begin to prioritize and better develop marketing strategies that address the full range of human existence. In a nutshell, marketers need to create engaging emotionally and physically stimulating brands that also satisfy our rational concerns of resistance.
Since the more primitive emotions, feelings, and motivations, especially those of the physical, reptilian brain, are primary to driving action, hitting upon these primal triggers can create strong and consistent behavioral responses. This observation helps explain why some marketing ideas are more prolific and viral than others. By dissecting the drives of the physical brain, marketers can better develop ideas that spread and influence behavior change, generating repeated engagement with a brand and igniting the obsessive loyalty that every marketer wants.
In his highly influential, revolutionary book The Selfish Gene, famous British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme”—a unit of cultural information that is transmitted from mind to mind through imitation and replication in a manner analogous to the transmission of genes.20 Memes include tunes, slogans, catchphrases, fashions, styles, and rituals that seem to spread throughout cultures as if they had a mind and intention all their own. I will demonstrate that most of the memes in our culture reflect our deepest, unconscious biological drives, or those Six S’s— survival, safety, security, sustenance, sex, and status. These themes are so often at the roots of many of the most prolific meme’s because they are both completely unconscious in origin and utterly important to survival.
Our brain is quite literally a “survival organ.” There’s no coincidence that arguably the two most pervasive marketing memes of all time piggybacked on one of our most basic survival needs: having enough to eat. Both of these memes cautioned and queried people about the scarcity of basic food staples through their simple slogans. I am referring to Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” and the California Milk Processor Board’s “Got milk?,” two advertising taglines identical in structure and equally potent in effect.
In the 1980s the catchphrase “Where’s the beef?” quickly found its way into the breadth and depth of American culture, capturing the mood of the time and the straightforward attitude of the brand. The slogan showed up everywhere from water cooler conversations to presidential debates, making the diminutive octogenarian Clara Peller, who was featured in the ad, a national icon. Today, roughly three decades later, the classic slogan returns to television to celebrate the launch of Wendy’s latest revamped hamburgers. The ubiquitous presence of that slogan and its influence in advertising and culture was perhaps surpassed only by another campaign for yet another basic food source with an uncannily similar inquiry, “Got milk?” This catchphrase began in the early 1990s and remains an active meme and international icon, becoming what few would argue is the most imitated and parodied slogan in American advertising history.
Like selfish genes whose sole purpose is replication, memes appear also to be guided by their own viral intentions, evolving organically through clever and not-so-clever variations. “Got milk?” continues to spawn countless co-created mutations as people, publicity seekers, and businesses substitute for “milk” virtually any other conceivable product, service, or concept, adapting the meme to fit their own devices. “Got milk?” and “Where’s the beef?” were exemplary ads brilliantly executed in their own right, but because they were built strategically on primal pillars, they were empowered to organically spread, launching them to the top of their craft and the fore of our culture. Under the obsessive inclinations of our physical brains, these memes perpetuate effortlessly without regard for rationality. As Dawkins puts it, we humans are merely “lumbering robots” programmed in service of the replication of our selfish genes, or in this instance, our selfish memes.21
If you think this is all just one big coincidence, think again. If you want further proof of the power of food memes, ask, as many others have, “Why the hell do we take pictures of food and post them online?” The next time you are on Facebook, scroll down your list of posts. Chances are you have at least one photograph of a seemingly random entrée, dessert, or snack. And this phenomenon is far from limited to Facebook. One of the largest and most active Flickr photo-sharing groups is called “I Ate This,” and similar trends can be found on Twitter, MySpace, Foodspotting, Shutterfly, FoodCandy, and Chowhound.22 Displaying our food to our digital tribe comes from that nonsensical, irrational part of our brain that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the most basic of human instincts: the need to eat in order to survive.
As an advertising strategic planner, I have long endured the complaints of copywriters and art directors while developing advertising for restaurant accounts. The creative team often bemoans the obligatory, formulaic inclusion of the hackneyed beauty shots of food that the client demands—the steaming cheese pulls of pizza, or the exaggerated portion of delectably delicious sandwiches and grill-marked steaks. But argue as the creative team might, the marketer is right about this one. When we see food in all its glory, we take notice. The emotionally charged instincts of our cerebellums motivate us off the couch and into the local Burger King, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell.
We all know the power of sex. But its value extends beyond the physical attraction to potential mates, and into the consequences of those sexual encounters: the next generation. This is evidenced by our utter fascination with babies and children. And why shouldn’t we be engrossed? From the standpoint of evolution, having children and perpetuating our genes is the purpose of sex. This explains why kids and babies are everywhere, from the hilarious E*trade baby commercials23 to the computer-generated Evian babies on roller skates who break-danced and back-flipped their way to what the Guinness Book of World Records declared was the most viewed online ad in history.24 And those are babies we don’t even know. On Facebook, parental displays of people’s children are even more commonplace than plates of pasta or bowls of beef. Some parents even choose a picture of their kid instead of their own profile shot. People post these pictures of their children because it arouses deep emotion, conferring status and pride in what is most important—the replication of our genes. According to the esteemed neurologist Antonio Damasio, social emotions like pride and admiration “exist as prepackaged arrangements in the biology of your brain.”25 These emotions are biological preconditions of evolutionary intelligence. In other words, we are born with them.
The mathematics on this one is simple: When you stack primal triggers you multiply the effect. This is why, when celebrities get pregnant, they automatically jump to the top of the Internet search charts. The event of their pregnancy not only sends a message about sexual reproduction, but also speaks to our innate obsession with status. America’s Top Chef has run on the cable network Bravo for nine seasons and counting, spawning two spinoffs (Top Chef: Masters and Top Chef: Just Desserts) with two more planned, because it combines status with sustenance. World’s Deadliest Catch combined triggers for sustenance, safety, security, and survival to make a group of crab fishermen one of the most successful shows on cable in 2007. The 2010 episode about the demise of one of the boat captains became the third most viewed broadcast in Discovery Channel history. We are all stopped dead in our tracks by messages of death because our number one goal is to live.
Unconscious branding amplifies exponentially when ads stack these primal triggers, such as food on top of sex. Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s hit the jackpot when they featured 2012 Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model Kate Upton steaming up the drive-in movie theater. Upton is seen chowing down on a spicy Southwest Patty Melt in a commercial created by the ad agency 72andSunny, sweating down her cleavage, and stripping off her pink sweater, an effort that quickly snagged the advertisers over a half billion impressions worldwide and rising.26
The famous Michelin tires baby and corresponding ad slogan, “Because so much is riding on your tires,” is an iconic and effective advertising creation that owes the roots of its success to the nature of our biology. “We are so proud of the impact the baby campaign has had over the years,” remarks a Michelin brand manager. “It’s rare for an advertising campaign to have this kind of longevity and influence.”27 But when you cleverly execute great ads on evolutionary pillars, such as safety, security, kinship and children (sex), you have the power to commandeer minds and persistently move people because they are steeped in primordial emotion. Harvard business professor Gerald Zaltman says the ad showing a child sitting in a tire evokes the deep unconscious, universal metaphor of a container that keeps the family safe. Zaltman employs a market research technique using images to get at consumers’ nonliteral, nonconscious metaphorical drivers of brand selection. He cites how the last version of the commercial, featuring a child positioned within a tire on a wet surface, surrounded by pairs of stuffed animals, invoked the secure imagery of Noah’s ark, the famous biblical container that withstood a catastrophe.28 By identifying the deeper meaning behind brands and ads, by mining for these unconscious metaphors through projective techniques like picture sorts and storytelling, marketers can consciously create ads directly aimed at these otherwise hidden drivers.
During the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, a single exposed breast created a national debate. The infamous Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction with its fleeting flash of flesh reportedly became the most digitally recorded and replayed moment in television history at the time according to TiVo, and the most talked about and controversial halftime event in Super Bowl history.29 Why do we care so much about something so trivial? Because to the physical brain, sex is a matter of life and death.
Nike is certainly one of the most lauded brands in modern day marketing because of an advertising campaign that challenged people to achieve their goals and aspirations, instructing them to “Just do it.” Before the campaign launched, the expression “do it” already existed as a pervasive meme and cultural euphemism for “having sex.” In 1968 the Beatles released the song, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” on their highly acclaimed White Album. McCartney reportedly wrote the song after he saw two monkeys copulating on the streets of India.30 In more recent decades, people have displayed all sorts of tribal affiliations using the same catchphrase, touting their sexual prowess through bumper stickers and T-shirts reading, “Ham radio operators do it with greater frequency,” “Ultimate Frisbee players do it horizontally,” and “Conservatives do it right,” etc. In 2008 a book was published called Just Do It, which chronicled the trials and tribulations of a man and his wife seeking to have intercourse for 101 consecutive days. Whether out of conscious foresight or unconscious intuition, Nike’s decision to bootstrap their brand expression on a preexisting meme for sexual reproduction was a smart move, putting the brand at the pinnacle of marketing and at the height of public consciousness.
No Fear, a niche market brand of extreme sports clothing made by an unknown designer, infectiously spread throughout American culture despite a pittance of advertising budget relative to mainstream apparel brands. Created in 1989 and popularized nationwide by the mid ’90s, this lifestyle-based clothing line rapidly became the existential catchphrase for the radically minded. Rebellious youth displayed hats, shirts, and accessories that expressed contempt for social norms and their resolve to triumph over one of our most basic of human tendencies.
No Fear is primal unconscious branding par excellence because the name itself is its marketing, intrinsically speaking to their target audience’s universal desire to feel dominance over submission. The name played into the innate human tendency toward self-deception, outwardly refuting the feeling we all have but cleverly conceal, and displacing fear with the more empowering side of the same coin, choosing fight over flight.
In 1998 the movie Titanic, about the ill-fated maiden voyage of the world’s largest steamship in early 1912, earned 1.8 billion, becoming the highest grossing film of all time, a distinction it retained for over a decade. After a 12-year run, it was dethroned at the box office by Avatar, which earned 2 billion, a movie about extraterrestrial tribal warfare. Whether it’s at the hands of others or against the forces of nature (or aliens from outer space), humans love to gaze through the lens of war, disaster, and destruction, because we are so deeply programmed by the darker, more violent nature of our reptilian brains. We all slow down to check out the roadside accident, both in our lives and on the screen, because we are so powerfully gripped by moving pictures of conflict and primal emotion.
Titanic leveraged one of the most memorable disasters of the twentieth century, the sinking of a large passenger ship, just as Avatar intimated associations with one of most memorable disasters of the twenty-first century, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers of 9/11. When the towering Na’vi Hometree falls after a missile attack, blanketing the landscape with floating embers, for many viewers it was impossible not to think of the September 11, 2001, attack, a day that will forever remain imprinted into the minds and memories of every American. When asked about the scene’s resemblance to the World Trade Center, James Cameron, who wrote and directed both Titanic and Avatar, replied that he had been “surprised at how much it did look like September 11th.”31 Whether by conscious design or unconscious intuition, Cameron, whose resume also includes Terminator, Rambo, and Aliens, is a master at making blockbuster action films that move us deeply at both the core of our being and the core of our brain.
The interest in death and destruction helps explain why today’s media consistently gives us the ability to connect and even interact with our more physical and violent nature without having to hurt ourselves or anyone else. This might explain the strong demand to experience warfare virtually, driving the success of video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which both broke the record for the biggest entertainment launch in history.32 The video game industry is now so pervasive that Late Night with Jimmy Fallon dedicates an entire week to it, interviewing not just actors and entertainers but game developers, designers, and industry leaders. As recurring guest Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, said in a June 11, 2012, interview, “there would probably be about as many people playing Call of Duty tonight in multiplayer as could fill about 400 Madison Square Gardens.”33 Whether watching the battles in Avatar from the perspective of an extraterrestrial humanoid, or playing a game of Killzone or Modern Warfare 3 from the viewpoint of the killer, or just enjoying the ritualized warfare of smashmouth football from the safety of the sidelines or the living room couch or the Internet-machinations of our own fantasy teams and leagues, many people like to engage in violence at arm’s length.
Not surprisingly, violence and destruction can also make for compelling advertising. But because of the heightened scrutiny that advertisers find themselves under, this is often better done tongue in cheek. The Blendtec Total Blender proved how a relatively unknown household appliance could destroy everything from a baseball to a camcorder or even an iPad in a series of online videos called “Will it blend?” Consumers were enthralled by the series of destructive shorts, as was a unanimous panel of judges who rated the effort as the second most effective social media campaign ever, according to Forbes.com, trailing only the break-out success of the Blair Witch Project34 and increasing sales by a whopping 700 percent.
But finding entertainment in violence is nothing new. Harvard experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker provides compelling evidence for this, citing sixteenth-century Paris where a popular form of entertainment was cat burning . . . lowering a basket or sack of live cats into the flames of a bonfire as dozens of onlookers would shriek and jeer with delight. Today abusing animals can make you the object of scorn and moral outrage, as well as get you sentenced to prison—just ask pro-football player Michael Vick. Instead, we watch Hannibal, Dawn of the Dead, or Drag Me to Hell, or play a casual game of Thrill Kill, Resident Evil, or Dead Rising. Today news media understand the benefits of focusing on the reptilian side of violence—pain and suffering boost ratings and engagement. Despite the daily global reports of terror, war, and revolution, and those ongoing stories of local murder, rape, and robbery, our present society is far less violent than it has been in previous history. According to Pinker, there is a worldwide trend toward decreased violence. He explains, “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”35
Perhaps the reason for this seemingly counterintuitive trend relates to our modern media usage and the role it plays in satisfying an innate thirst for violence. Could the decreased violence in the real world be due to the increased violence in the media, offering far more opportunities to sublimate our darker thoughts in dissociated or virtual bloodshed? Some conclude that it is the media that causes violence, but is it possible that the critics have it backwards? The videogame industry does not appear to turn virtual violence into real violence. More than a generation has now been raised on violent video games and there is no evidence that there are more socio-paths and snipers today. According to Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, founders of the Center for Mental Health and Media and members of the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School, the rate of juvenile crimes has actually decreased as the usage of video games in the past two decades has skyrocketed.36
Young children are impressionable and impetuous, lacking the ability to filter and restrain impulses because their frontal cortex, the part of the brain that does this, is still forming. But can the media in our society actually help some people vent their more violent impulses in manners that are less harmful and more socially acceptable? Can a child sublimate his primal urge to bully and dominate others by playing a video game instead? Can violence in the media play a therapeutic role in helping us face our own mortality, an awareness we humans uniquely share? I say this not to condone violence in the media but only to help explain its function and growing prevalence, and our increasingly insatiable appetite for more and more. Like it or not, violence sells because it’s in our DNA and our biology. All humans have a dark side, or what Carl Jung called “the Shadow,” an unconscious reservoir of negativity that deepens without an outlet. And based upon the glacial pace at which our brains evolve, it’s not going away any time soon.
An experiment led by Professor Beatrice de Gelder, from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, demonstrated that a man left completely blind after multiple strokes was still able to successfully navigate an obstacle course using his sense of where the impediments were. As de Gelder said: “This is absolutely the first study of this ability in humans. We see what humans can do, even with no awareness of seeing or any intentional avoidance of obstacles. It shows us the importance of these evolutionary ancient visual paths. They contribute more than we think they do for us to function in the real world.”37
This phenomenon known as blind-sight exemplifies the influence of our reptilian legacy, providing peculiar evidence for the existence and importance of the unconscious as a driver of perception and human behavior. Blind-sight appears to be a seemingly lizardlike ability to react to the environment reflexively, enabling us to move rapidly and appropriately without having to think about it.
In de Gelder’s experiment, a blind patient known only as TN was able to safely maneuver through a random obstacle course made up of boxes and chairs without so much as bumping into a single object. Authorities believe that blind-sight demonstrates that even though our eyes cannot identify the object, there is a part of the brain that can respond on an unconscious level.38 For example, a man who is completely blind demonstrated that he was still capable of seeing and responding to facial expressions registering emotions like anger and joy, even though the regions of his brain involved in processing visual information remained totally inactive.39 That’s because the brain has thirty different areas involved with the processing of visual information that are processed along two pathways: the old and evolutionarily ancient low road from the brain stem, which is unconscious, and the new higher pathway that leads to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, which is conscious.
Acclaimed neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and distinguished professor with the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program, University of California, San Diego, explains the contradiction of “seeing without seeing” in describing a patient who can detect motion in a visual field to which he is completely blind. “It’s almost as if the patient is using ESP. He can see, and yet cannot see. So it’s a paradox. It turns out from the eyeball to the higher centers of the brain, where you interpret the visual image, there is not just one pathway, there are two separate pathways that subserve different aspects of vision, one of these pathways is the evolutionary new pathway, the more sophisticated pathway if you like, that goes from the eyeball through the thalamus to the visual cortex of the brain.”40
One needs the visual cortex in order to see something, but the other pathway—the one that is “evolutionarily older and more prominent in animals like rodents, lower mammals, birds, and reptiles—goes to the brain stem, the stalk on which the brain sits, and [from there, information] gets relayed eventually to the higher centers of the brain. This older pathway going through the brain stem is concerned with reflexive behavior,” Ramachandran says, making you pay attention to something important in your visual field, controlling your eye movements, and directing your gaze. As Ramachandran describes it, “In these patients, one of these pathways alone is damaged. The visual cortex is damaged. And because that’s gone, the patient doesn’t see anything consciously. But the other pathway is still intact. And he can use that pathway to guess correctly the direction of movement of an object that he cannot see.”41
He adds that in some ways we all experience blind-sight in our daily lives, such as when we drive a car. When you are driving and having a conversation with a passenger, for example, you are occupying conscious attention to the conversation, and at the same time you are unconsciously responding to the activity on the road. Only if something unusual happens, such as a big truck passing by, will you actually notice it. In a sense, blind-sight enables you to navigate through the world, whether on the road to work or on the path to sales closure in the cluttered purchase funnel, you’re on autopilot while still being consciously active in the present.42
For marketers this means we are always processing information on both levels and we can’t disregard the level that we can’t see. Neuromarketing seeks to identify and understand the responses we can’t see or articulate by studying bodily and brain reactions.
William James, the father of American psychology, first drew our attention to the physical nature of emotions in the 1880s. James offered a prescient look at the sequencing of emotional and rational processing, proposing that emotions are actually mental interpretations of physiological states. For example, James believed that when we experience fear, we first feel the bodily response of emotion—the increase in heart rate, the tensing of muscles, the sweaty palms—and then, and only then, as a reaction to these body states of panic do we have the awareness of that emotion.43 Later, neuro-science would support James’s theory, helping to reverse a widely held belief that rationality is the driving force of human cognition and decision making.
Joseph LeDoux, professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University, pioneered the study of emotions as a biological phenomenon. LeDoux’s research on fear and anxiety demonstrated how our bodies take action without our minds even knowing. We take action based upon the emotional processing of an event, often ignoring rational processing altogether. “The conscious brain may get all the attention,” says LeDoux, “but consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it’s slave to everything that works beneath it.”44
LeDoux’s findings showed us that the amygdala can literally hijack our mind and body, causing us to respond while completely bypassing our cerebral cortex, the seat of our conscious awareness. He indicated that there are two key neural pathways in reaction to environmental stimuli. There is a quicker, more impulsive, unconscious response, or the low road, and a slower, more considered, and conscious response, the high road.
The high road includes both an emotional and a rational component, a recursive feedback loop between the feeling and thinking parts of the brain. If you can recall or imagine the experience of unexpectedly encountering what appears to be a snake, you can see how these neural pathways function. You might see a frightening object and immediately jump—the fast route—and then a moment later recognize that it was only a garden hose—the slow route.
The overactive amygdala was essential in our hunter-gatherer past, where impending threats from saber-toothed tigers or competing tribes required quick, life-saving, response-without-thought behaviors. As a result, the wiring of our brains today still heavily favors rapid-fire emotional reactions that bypass conscious logical thinking. That’s because the neural circuits of information flows from the amygdala to the cortex are like superhighways, while the pathways traveling from the rational systems to the emotional systems are like country roads. Since the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that enables us to consciously choose our behavior, low-road decisions that bypass these higher cortical functions are made unconsciously for us by the brain’s emotional systems.45
In other words, our emotions influence our thinking much more than our thinking influences our emotions. As LeDoux puts it, the “human brain (like every other part of the body and every part of life and biology) is a work in progress.” Because evolution is such a slow, ongoing process, LeDoux says, “At this point in our evolutionary history, the systems involved in thinking, reasoning [conscious], planning, and decision making are poorly connected with the brain systems involved in controlling our emotions.” This explains why emotions tend to control us, and why it is often hard to control our emotions.46
The implications for marketers are clear: to move people quickly and with the least amount of resistance, we need to focus much of our effort on low-road physical and emotional processing, which are the superhighways to the consumer unconscious.
Because these emotional systems can function independently from the cortex, memories and response repertoires can be formed without us ever knowing. It’s like no one was home when we were out living and learning. Our conscious minds, seated in the neocortex, are often oblivious to the fact that memories and learned responses are being formed in the present.
Joseph LeDoux gives an example of how this might happen. “Let’s say we were having lunch one day and there’s a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and we have this argument. And the next day I see somebody coming down the street and I say, I have this gut feeling about this guy, he’s an s.o.b. and I don’t like him. And maybe what’s going on there is that he’s got a red-and-white checkered necktie on. Consciously, I’m saying it’s my gut feeling because I don’t like the way he looks, but what’s happened is that the necktie has triggered the activation of the amygdala through the thalamus, the so-called low road, triggered a fear response in me, which I now consciously interpret as this gut feeling about not liking the guy. But in fact, it’s being triggered by external stimuli that I’m not processing consciously.”47
In his book Buyology, branding expert and neuromarketing pioneer Martin Lindstrom points out an example of how Silk Cut, a popular brand of cigarettes in the United Kingdom, in advance of legislation that would ostensibly ban cigarette advertising by forcing the removal of brand logos and messaging, began to position its logo against a background of purple silk in every ad it ran. After the advertising ban came into effect the advertiser simply ran outdoor ads that featured the silk without the logo or any message. Consumers had unconsciously learned the connection so that the logo or the brand and message were no longer needed. Research revealed that virtually all of those surveyed were aware of the brand as a result of seeing the ad. They had transferred their feelings and awareness of the brand to another variable, the purple silk.
Likewise, consumers can be both negatively and positively pre-disposed to a brand based on their associations with its ads, slogans, logos, mascots, design elements, and brand properties. People may not really know why they love one brand and not another, because conscious thought may have had little to do with the emotional tags that were formed when their preferences were learned. For example, Lindstrom recounts how he helped a leading beverage company create a sound when opening the can that was subtly different from other cans to trigger a unique craving for their brand’s drink. The manufacturer redesigned the can to create a differentiating snapping sound, a branded cue of delicious anticipation. They then recorded the sound in a studio and incorporated it into advertising. The manufacturer would play the sound at major concerts and sporting events, seeing an instant uptick in sales for their brand when they did so. Yet when consumers were asked why they suddenly choose that particular beverage over another they would say things like “I haven’t the faintest idea, I just fell for it.”48
What is particularly counterintuitive about memory formation, and important to bear in mind, is that vivid memories are not necessarily accurate memories. They simply correspond with a strong emotion, which often convinces the person that they are recalling the event as it really happened. Research studies that have investigated how emotionally charged memories change over time show that the facts and details of the memories are quite malleable even if the memory itself remains strikingly clear. As LeDoux states, “We know that emotional memories are stored more vividly than other kinds of memories. It used to be thought that they were more accurate, but in fact now we know that they are not more accurate, they’re just more vivid and strong in the personal sense. But they can be highly inaccurate.”49
LeDoux goes on to illustrate how a memory of emotionally charged events can change despite our subjective conviction that we are remembering an experience vividly as it actually happened. He points to research conducted by a group of psychologists that asked witnesses of the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disaster to recall the experience of the disaster immediately after the event had occurred. These witnesses were then surveyed again a year later and their recollections were completely different from their original responses. Several years later after that, their responses again changed completely. As LeDoux indicated, “What we remember is not necessarily what we experienced originally. The accuracy of those memories changes over time, but their strength in terms of your subjective feeling that it was a really powerful experience is there.”
This is why market research participants sometimes report with great conviction the origins and circumstances of their own pleasures, preferences, and interests, when the details are not really grounded in actual fact or experience. Our emotions can sometimes deceive us. And marketers can be deceived by those emotions. Very often panelists are surveyed over time, not unlike those in the Challenger study, and the accuracy of their memories need to be looked at with a grain or perhaps a chunk of salt. Which is why, as a rule of thumb, it is better to track or observe real behavior rather than opinion.
The possibility of emotional deceit also represents an opportunity for marketers to erase consumers’ bad brand memories with strongly positive emotions and experiences. For instance, I learned through talking to cable and satellite subscribers that a television service provider can win back the good graces of a disgruntled customer who had a really poor installation experience by surprising and delighting them with an emotionally charged offer, like a free six months of their premium program package as an apology and gesture of goodwill. Our feelings help us forgive and forget. Good emotions help erase bad memories.
A fascinating illustration of how this process of associative learning and memory works comes from V. S. Ramachandran. A patient of Ramchandran’s, injured in a car accident, slipped into a coma. After several weeks, he regained consciousness but could no longer recognize his mother. On her first visit, the patient exclaimed: “Who is this woman? She looks like my mother but she is an imposter.”
This disorder, known as Capgras, can be explained by a structural problem in the brain, according to Ramachandran. When you see someone you know as your mother, the part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus is activated and identifies the face as your mom, and then a signal is sent to the amygdala, which associates the face with emotional memories of “mother.” Ramachandran explains that Capgras patients have a severed neural connection between visual recognition and emotional recognition. As a result, the patient recognizes someone that looks like mom but lacks the accompanying feelings that are associated with mother.
According to Ramachandran, because we are so dependent on our emotional reactions to the world around us, the emotions win out over the visual perceptions. The brain rationalizes that the mother must somehow have been replaced with a pretender. The evidence for this explanation lies in an intriguing quirk in the patient’s behavior. He was able to easily recognize his mother when she called on the phone and he heard her voice. Yet if she walked into the room, phone in hand, he would reverse his belief and think again that she was an imposter. Our own rationalizations can be quite irrational.
Ramachandran indicates that the reason for this is that the amygdala has different connections to the auditory and visual systems of the brain. Since his connection between his emotions and auditory system remained intact, only hearing her voice convinced the man that it was his mother because that experience was accompanied by familiar feelings.50
Ramachandran’s findings demonstrate that emotions and sensory perception are intricately connected. In order to make sense of our experiences we need to assign them value through our emotions. After all, our relationship to our mother is among the most emotionally charged. Without the emotional connection of the meaning of mother, the patient’s mother lost her precious relevance and identity in the eyes of her own son. Likewise, brands lose relevance when they fail to connect emotionally with people, and without that emotional attachment they can be easily replaced with generic imposters.
Among the most remarkable contributions to the study of cognition and decision making are those of the renowned neurologist Antonio Damasio, professor at the University of Southern California. Along with Joseph LeDoux, Damasio has helped achieve the long-sought integration of emotion into mainstream cognitive science. Demonstrating that emotions and cognition are inextricably linked, and that our emotional systems are the substrate of much of our ability to reason, these scientists have solidified the theory that decisions are contingent on emotion.
To illustrate this point, Damasio explains the peculiar behavior of one of his patients, Elliot, who had suffered brain damage to a part of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is implicated in the risk and benefit analysis of decision making. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is critical to our ability to relate present events in our life with past emotional associations. Elliot ostensibly seemed normal, with one glaring exception. He lacked the ability to make decisions, deliberating endlessly in the face of simple, mundane choices such as whether or not to use a black or blue pen.
For example, when deciding which restaurant to eat at, Elliot would painstakingly consider each menu, agonizing over seemingly trivial details like light schemes and seating plans. He would even drive to each location to find out if they were busy. Elliot would obsess over minute facts, logically comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of each choice. If a restaurant was not busy, he would conclude that he could easily get a table, but on the other hand, if there were few patrons that might imply that the food was bad. Because brain damage had severed the connection between his emotions and his rational thinking, Elliot was strangely devoid of feeling and even emotionally numb to his own tragic inability to make decisions.51
Damasio’s research helped explain this peculiarity through a pivotal research experiment known as the Iowa Gambling Task. This experiment consisted of a psychological test designed to better understand real-world decision making. Subjects could freely choose from four decks of playing cards in an attempt to win money. Two of the decks were bad decks full of high risk cards, while the other two were profitable decks that yielded conservative but consistent pay-outs and rarely punished players. Participants were able to choose their draws freely from each pile in an effort to determine the most profitable decks and make the most money.
The experimenters asked the participants to report when they could explain why they favored one deck over another. On average it required about 50 cards before a participant began to change their behavior and favor a certain deck, and about 80 cards before they became aware why they favored one deck over another. Rationality is a relatively slow process. But in addition to asking participants to explain their behavior, they also measured their emotional responses by gauging galvanic skin responses, which showed how the electrical properties of skin responded to anxiety and stress through such indicators as perspiration.
The experimenters found that the body got “nervous” after drawing only about ten cards from the losing decks. Even though the subjects were not consciously aware, their bodies developed an accurate sense of fear and anxiety in response to a bad deck well in advance of the rational mind. The subject’s feelings were faster and more accurate, having figured it out way before the conscious mind was tipped off to what was happening.
In addition, neurologically impaired patients like Elliot, unable to access their emotions due to damage to their prefrontal cortex, were unable to learn to choose the right cards from the profitable decks. These purely rational patients often went bankrupt because they were incapable of associating negative feelings with the losing decks. Denied the emotional pain of loss and the pleasure of gain, their mind never learned to make the right decisions and respond in the appropriate fashion.52
On the basis of these observations, Damasio formulated the landmark somatic marker hypothesis. This model of decision making shows how our decisions often depend upon access to what he calls somatic markers, feelings that are tagged and stored in the body and our unconscious minds. As Damasio states, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent literally in the flesh.”53
These emotional body states become anchored and associated with specific outcomes that shape and guide our decisions. Marketers can learn to trigger these somatic markers by design, by anchoring positive messages repeatedly with specific consistent stimuli through sensory cues of sights, sounds, and even smells. The massively successful “Intel Inside” program that positioned the company’s microprocessor as a world-class player synonymous with the computer industry was enabled through marketing cooperation with other computer makers who did much of the advertising on Intel’s behalf. Partner advertisers simply incorporated the brief Intel auditory signature and logo at the end of their television spots. The widely familiar Intel tones became powerful affecting sounds, a unique and memorable three-second animated jingle anchoring their logo and the five-tone melody to the positive feelings of reassurance that the best chip powers their computer.54 Deutsch LA, during the early days of Internet travel sites, introduced a similar two-second sound clip for Expedia, which rang out the lyrics “Expedia . . . dot com” over a brief melody at the end of every spot, unmistakably branding each execution and helping Expedia carve out a lead position in the rapidly emerging online travel industry.
A few years ago, chain hotels began branding their guests’ experience with a signature scent. I always notice the same fragrance when I walk through the entrance of the Westin in Reston Heights outside of Washington, DC, on my visits to Volkswagen’s headquarters. It automatically gives me a strong, olfactory reminder of my stay. Have you ever noticed how our sense of smell so easily brings about vivid memories? That’s because our sense of smell bypasses the thalamus, the brain’s sensory switchboard, and goes directly to the memory and emotional centers, which in turn unleash a powerful flood of emotions.55 Signature scents in marketing if coupled with favorable events can trigger positive emotions, not unlike how the smell of grandma’s baked apple pie makes you eagerly anticipate her delicious dessert.
Consistency of branding elements across the five senses is the key to triggering these supercharged branding moments by activating somatic markers, provided your experience with the product is a good one. In the multitude of possibilities, why do we choose Oreo cookies, Kellogg’s corn flakes, or Samsung televisions? Because our bodies have taught our minds that these choices make us feel good. If brands are shortcuts for decisions, somatic markers are the mechanism for how these shortcuts are formed, storing them in our bodies as good, bad, or indifferent, retrieving them with our minds and putting the products in our hands.
Because of the work of LeDoux and Damasio, we are beginning to understand that the process of decision-making behavior is led by the heart and followed by the head. As Damasio says, “We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”56
Marketing messages that are most effective strike at our feelings first and foremost with what Damasio calls “emotionally competent stimuli.” This does not mean that emotions decide for us, but often weigh in early and heavily into our decisions. In addition, emotions are inextricably interconnected with rationality. The new paradigm suggests that having a sensory experience, such as seeing an advertisement, creates a feeling in the body first, as opposed to a thought. One then becomes conscious of and thinks about those feelings, deciding from there whether or not to take action. Sometimes this process occurs in a recursive loop, where feeling leads to thinking to more feeling to more thinking, etc., before the scale is tipped into a decision and, ultimately, a behavior. In essence, we tend to make decisions emotionally and then justify them rationally.57 In certain types of retail-focused ads, Deutsch LA has used a philosophy called “brand-tailing,” which perfectly fits this two-part process. Based on a belief that a well constructed advertisement can both build the brand and make the sale, it leads with emotion and ends with logical information, such as where and how to buy the product and what it will cost.
Somatic markers are the water level on the iceberg metaphor of the mind, the divide where the vast unconscious becomes conscious. If your advertisement is not stirring a feeling inside the bodies of people, your message is meandering slowly down a country road when it should really be speeding toward your target audience on a superhighway.