Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
—Chinese Proverb
ONE SNOWY MORNING THE YOUNG AND INSATIABLY CURIOUS Milton Erickson woke up early to conduct a little experiment. While walking the snow-covered pathway on his way to school, he zigzagged back and forth through the rapidly accumulating snow to create a wavy-patterned trail on the otherwise straight route. When he returned home that afternoon Milton was amused to find that others had followed his lead, tracing his absurd meanderings rather than taking the more direct route. From that early lesson, Erickson realized that people have a tendency to act without thinking, living their lives on autopilot by simply following the well-worn paths established by others. Erickson grew up to revolutionize psychotherapy, becoming the world’s leading authority in medical hypnosis and one of the most effective psychotherapists ever. The unorthodox psychiatrist became legendary for his “miracle cures” that tapped into the power of his patients’ unconscious minds, rapidly and often unwittingly transforming their behaviors—much like he changed the habits of his schoolmates on that snowy day.1
The most important step to changing our unconscious inclinations is to take action. The more frequently we walk the paths of these new behaviors, the more automatic and habitual they become, ultimately requiring little or no conscious attention or effort. The seven steps to behavior change that are described in this book are intended to be a useful model, a simplification of an extremely complex process: the manner in which our minds work to change our behavior. These seven steps are an intelligible, logical method that can help to identify and influence the dimensions that matter most to that process of change. From pattern interruption to action, this process reflects the general sequence in which behavior change occurs, both in individuals and in market environments. It aims to elucidate a rational and conscious understanding of a largely unconscious and emotional process. However, because the brain is a patchwork of distinct, conflicted, combinatorial, and often paradoxical drives, this process must always be viewed systemically as a collective whole. It is not a factory assembly line of behavioral output that can be mechanistically reduced to its sequential parts, but rather an interrelated and interactive process. The unconscious mind is always working on multiple levels, simultaneously parallel-processing information. These seven steps occur as both a linear process and an interconnected, recursive loop in which thoughts, feelings, and actions constantly and mutually influence each other.
Even in the digital age, broadcast television remains the dominant media for major advertisers. The reason television commercials remain effective is that, comparatively speaking, they are still among the most neurally engaging and multisensory of media, captivating our attention on large flat-screen TVs in a typically less cluttered environment than the Internet. But, despite the industry’s continued homage to the almighty 30-second commercial and the much heralded promise of the virtual and digital realm, as Marvin Gaye sang in his 1968 hit, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.” One of the greatest ironies in marketing is that despite continued heavy media investments, branding does not simply occur by staring at the TV sitting in your living room, nor by surfing the Internet from your office desk. It happens in the tangible interactions of authentic human experiences.
The goal of marketing should be not only to turn thought into action via advertising, but also to turn action into thought via experience. As Timothy Wilson says, “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitudes and feelings.”2 When we leap to a new behavior, our conscious mind weaves a logically consistent narrative. We post-rationalize our actions through cognitive dissonance, seeking to reconcile the conflict and discomfort between our old ideas and our new actions so that the latter may be adjusted and conformed to our preexisting attitudes. We assign causality to our novel behaviors, often concluding that we made the conscious, considered choice to act prompted by our established attitudes and beliefs. We seek to align our personal identity to match these new behaviors.
For example, let’s say the next time you visit your local coffee shop, you are offered a free cup of Tazo decaffeinated green tea instead of your usual café latte. You choose to opt for the pattern interrupt, taking the tea instead, and while enjoying the beverage, you make a mental note to consider purchasing the green tea on your next visit. You say to yourself, “I know that I have always been health conscious even though I don’t always act that way.” You affirm that you have indeed been thinking about cutting back on caffeine and fat. You conclude, “I guess I’m really a tea drinker after all, not the die-hard coffee fiend I used to be.” You believe that it was you calling all the shots when really the response was prompted by circumstance and molded by the environment.
Does this mean marketers should put all their money into sales promotion and renounce advertising? Absolutely not. Much like Milton Erickson did for his classmates, the role of marketing is to make the path toward brand purchase the path of least resistance. Through the collective empowerment of pattern interruption, comfort, imagination, feeling, rationality, and association change, people can be given an easy pathway to take action without even having to think about it. Marketers need to leverage the full spectrum of behavioral influence so that when it comes time to take that all-important step to purchase, the audience has already established receptivity to the brand and its goals, messages, and benefits.
The essence of unconscious branding is to make the brand stand for something by laying down a patterned pathway of positively pre-disposed neuro-associations in the minds of people. Take Starbucks, for example. They used to effectively advertise their coffee shops, but these days they no longer need to invest heavily in brand advertising. Starbucks appears to be an anomaly in that it has spent far less on traditional advertising than other big chains but has become one of the most valued brands in the world.3 The brand is now so strongly established that the brand name and the word “coffee” have even been removed from the logo. Leadership in premium coffee is now an unconscious connection with Starbucks, positioning them for further growth into other relevant and meaningful food and beverage areas. As marketing consultant Al Ries states, “Starbucks is following a well-worn path. Build a brand that stands for something and then try to figure out what other products you can hang the brand name on.”4
Starbucks Coffee Company transformed the specialty coffee industry, growing from a small regional player into the undisputed leader. They did so not just by offering the best quality coffee, but also by providing an unmatched retail experience that was replicated consistently and unmistakably across the globe and all of its touch points. According to CEO Howard Schultz, the reason that Starbucks doesn’t need to rely just on advertising is that it is in “over 16,000 neighborhoods around the world, in more than 50 countries, forming connections with millions of customers every day in our stores, in grocery aisles, at home, and at work.”5 The strength of their branded neural networks of associative connections is forged every day in the minds of its customers through real-world experiences in its ubiquitously consistent network of coffee shops.
What Starbucks did was piggyback on the pleasures of one of the most deep-seated and addictive cultural rituals and consumer habits: the coffee break. It was a strategy that would almost guarantee loyalty provided that the outcomes of the consumer experience remained consistently favorable. Critical to this strategy was its service orientation. Starbucks’ baristas are focused on customer satisfaction and compliant to individual preferences, catering to specific whims for three shots espresso, extra hot, one pump, fat free, no whip, double cup, and more, and readily redoing customers’ orders when faced with discontent. A great retail experience is the essence of their branding. For centuries, humans have relished the experience of the coffee break to relax, recharge, and socially connect. Starbucks was the first and best chain to lay claim to the actual experience, and they did so on a grand scale, providing the ideal physical environments to make these rituals not only possible but also enjoyable, offering a third locale to work and home. These authentic, in-the-flesh, physical interactions among customers, store, and baristas contributed to a strong brand valuation, which was greater than any investment in traditional media would have been.
From a neurobiological standpoint, the goal of unconscious branding is to transform neural pathways of positively predisposed brand associations into profitable behavioral pathways, bridging our thought patterns into behavioral patterns and turning thoughts about coffee into trips to Starbucks. The quicker we can animate thoughts and feelings into positive behaviors, the better. As William James once offered, “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of habits you aspire to gain.”6 Whether you are trying to change your life for the better or seeking to improve your marketing program, the rules of the game are identical. Brands that engage people not just in thought but in practice are best remembered, understood, and often the most successful. There is great wisdom in the Jewish principle of na’aseh v’nishma, which means “we will do and we will listen.” According to religious belief, “practice of a commandment precedes understanding and practice is the only path to understanding.”7 The same wisdom holds true for advertisers. In order to get people to fully understand and appreciate the benefits of your brand, people must experience your product and brand firsthand. Only then will they understand its true value.
Organisms that lack movement lack brains. You will not find a brain in a tree or a flower or a cactus because those entities that have no need for movement also have no need for a brain. Take for instance the sea squirt—an aquatic animal that begins life searching for a place to live. When it discovers the right rock to permanently attach itself to, it no longer requires the services of its brain. So, waste not, want not. It makes a meal of its brain and eats it, celebrating its new-found sedentary lifestyle.8
It turns out Descartes did indeed have it all wrong when he said: “I think, therefore I am.” If you look at the functions of the brain, it should perhaps more accurately be said that: “I move, therefore I think,” according to Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Parma, Italy.9 So much of our brain structures are dedicated to the systems governing movement that some even say practically all of our brain contributes in some way to our motor skills. As the neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert of the University of Cambridge states: “I would argue that we have a brain for one reason and one reason only. And that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement. There is no other reason to have a brain. . . . Things like sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they are only important to drive movement.”10 We are more like “human doings” than we are “human beings.”
Indeed, most areas of our neocortex are involved in the control of voluntary movement.11 Our nervous system is fundamentally designed to perceive our environments and to take action. There are essentially three types of neurons: (1) motor neurons that carry signals from the central nervous system to the outer parts of the body, controlling actions; (2) sensory neurons that take information from the outer parts of the body into the central nervous system from the senses; and (3) interneurons that connect the various neurons throughout the brain and spinal cord.12 When we motivate people into physical action, engaging more than just their perception, cognition, and emotion, we involve more of their neurology, impressing the brand deeper into long-term memory. Not only do real-life experiences involve our vast motor systems, they vividly engage our multiple sensory systems. Through sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, they give us more ways to firmly establish and represent the memory in the part of the brain that drives response. As doctors George I. Viamontes and Bernard D. Beitman observe in their article “Mapping the Unconscious in the Brain,” “The unconscious is a vital functional core that anchors the behavioral repertoire of every organism that has a brain.”13 In other words, the path to behavior change is the path to our unconscious minds.
The goal of marketing is to generate sales intention through positive, repetitive brand experiences, which include but also go beyond the product itself. We love Starbucks not just for its coffee, but even more so for the pleasures of the experiences it provides, an insight similar to that which inspired General Foods International Coffee television commercials many years ago when they suggested, “Celebrate the moments of our lives.” All humans actually have an innate distaste for bitterness, an omnipresent characteristic of all coffees. When tasting something bitter, a common reaction for humans would be to spit it out to avoid poisoning, since bitterness signals warning of the presence of toxins.14 This is why children don’t usually like the taste of coffee and why bitter-tasting synthetic chemicals are commonly added to toxic substances, like antifreeze and denatured alcohol, to avoid accidental poisoning.15 But thanks in part to powerful brands like Starbucks, modern humans have learned to override and transform our innate distaste for bitter flavors into a compulsory delight. We learn to associate coffee with these rituals of relaxation and socialization, as well as the pleasurable effects of caffeine. Repetitive positive experiences over time can help us to overcome our instincts, and for companies like Starbucks, it has transformed a cheap commodity into a five-dollar indulgence.
It is no surprise that some of the most successful brands in the world leverage physical experiences to their advantage. Disney gave us Disney parks. Target made discount shopping chic. Nike supported athletic aspiration, encouraging action in the sports we love. We love our cars—from our Volkswagens to our Toyotas, from our Bentleys to our Beamers—because they quite literally move us to our destinations throughout life. Apple was the first computer brand to truly comprehend that technology isn’t really about technology but about what it enables individuals to do. Likewise, AT&T reached customers by poignantly suggesting they “Reach out and touch someone,” even though the phone company was about helping people to communicate from afar.
But what would happen if a brand ceased talking about itself and instead chose to make action-oriented experiences the cornerstone of its marketing? And what if that brand declined its own share of voice, preferring to improve its market share by providing tangible, entertaining gatherings in lieu of amusing yet more removed advertisements? Leveraging real-life experiences can empower a brand’s development and help it to achieve remarkable sales efficiency by shunning traditional marketing in favor of grassroots, experiential tactics.
Perhaps the hottest brand to fly in the face of traditional trends is Red Bull, the Austria-based company that first conceived the energy drink category. From the very beginning the brand was not without its challenges. When founder Dietrich Mateschitz was first inspired by a syrupy, medicine-like tonic that helped revitalize him after a business trip to Thailand, the concept of an energy drink was neither well known nor well received among Westerners. As Mateschitz said, “If I don’t create the market, it doesn’t exist.”16 When he hired a market research firm to test the product’s appeal, the survey research yielded catastrophic results. Mateschitz recalls, “People didn’t believe the taste, the logo, the brand name. I’d never before experienced such a disaster.” He chose to ignore the research results, however, and introduced Red Bull in 1987. Once it was on the shelves, there was nothing unique or “ownable” about the product itself. Its contents were not patented. The ingredients were listed right on the can and anyone could copy or emulate it, and eventually a hundred or so imitators did, including industry giants like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Anheuser-Busch.17 On top of all these pitfalls, Red Bull would retail at a huge price premium, eventually selling at around 2 for a single 8.4-ounce can, at least double what you would pay for a 12-ounce can of Coke.18
Despite this, Mateschitz went on to create not only a legendary brand but also a textbook case in unconscious branding. He converted market and product weaknesses into brand strengths through the empowerment of inspiring actions. Ironically, he himself hadn’t been a very good student of business, taking ten years to graduate at the age of 28 from the University of Commerce in Vienna with a degree in marketing. Perhaps it was because of his fondness for the college experience, as he confessed in an interview: “Life as a student is enjoyable.”19
Fortunately for Red Bull, sales and marketing is less about scholastic aptitude and intellectual understanding and more about emotional attunement and motivational understanding. Mateschitz’s strengths were in his drive, character, and personality. He had an engaging zest for collegiate life. His friends said he liked to party, play, and pursue pretty women. Convivial, energetic, charming, and funny, he was ambitious and undaunted in both his business and life pursuits.20 As it turned out, this rich set of traits would be instrumental to his later success as a marketing pioneer, helping him to topple traditional marketing models with an approach to branding that media alone could never capture, and forever rewriting the textbooks of marketing.
Mateschitz has what psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to as “emotional intelligence” or “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. It describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence— the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ.”21 In other words, Mateschitz had street smarts and not just book smarts. He had acquired emotional attunement and social savvy about the lives of college students through his own experiences as a student. Goleman believes that one’s EQ, not just one’s IQ, is the quality that often elevates and distinguishes great, successful leaders. Mateschitz understood that marketing is not just about understanding the numbers; it’s about understanding the people. He fine-tuned this skill set through his ten years of experience at campus parties and social gatherings, more so than in the theoretical musings of classrooms and lecture halls. He went on to demonstrate an unprecedented understanding and efficiency in connecting with this cynical college demographic, a highly influential group that often resists mainstream corporate advertising but would be critical to building the Red Bull castle.
From the start, traditional marketing was summarily rejected. Initially, Red Bull avoided television, and didn’t use outdoor, print, or digital ads, but chose grassroots, experiential efforts. Red Bull let people try the product free of cost through one of the most celebrated human experiences: the time-honored tradition of a good (but not necessarily old-fashioned) party. The foolproof branding plan was to give hip, young, and influential college students free cases of the energy drink and encourage them to throw their own event, a lucrative tactic that cost the marketer next to nothing. Through its alliance with the in-crowd and the alpha-partiers, Red Bull would become the dominant player in an emergent and rapidly growing category, going from obscurity to a staple at parties, bars, and clubs worldwide.
On the surface this may seem like simple sales promotion and free product sampling, but it was about neither the product nor the promotion. It was all about the social event itself. As Mateschitz explains, “We don’t bring the product to the consumer, we bring the consumer to the product.”22 The goal was to create the best parties, not the best energy drink. As the brand grew so did the parties, with Red Bull becoming synonymous with high-octane fun and first-rate happenings that included huge crowds, big shots, celebrities, enormous venues, pumping music, and the ubiquitous presence of Red Bull drinks and mixers. In short, they branded the most exhilarating and social life experience of all, attracting active, on-the-go, and high-energy youth who were the primary targets.
Red Bull would later expand these tactics to bring the energetic brand to even greater experiential heights by sponsoring live events of the most intensely physical sort: extreme sports. Red Bull sponsored legions of affordable, death-defying athletes of less-than-mainstream but greatly exhilarating sports. These athletes were the up–and-coming rock stars of the newer generation, showcasing physical bravery and athletic prowess universally admired by men and desired by women. These branded iconic heroes enjoyed cultlike followings among the younger and more influential demographics. Today there are close to 500 world-class Red Bull sponsored athletes including BASE jumpers (BASE stands for buildings, antennas, spans—i.e., bridges—and earth—i.e., cliffs), cliff divers, big-wave surfers, motocross riders, snowboarders, and skateboarders, all risking life and limb in worldwide competitions and outrageous stunts.23
Having dispensed with the expected marketing tactics, the brand not only sponsors cutting-edge and original athletes, it has invented and hosts incredible, newfangled, and sensational competitions like “Red Bull Crashed Ice,” an adrenaline-pumping combination of hockey and downhill skiing in which competitors skate, crash, tumble, and fly their way down a mountain, or the wacky “Red Bull’s Flugtag” or “flying day,” in which competitors seek to fly the farthest over water in their homemade flying machines.24 Not only did these experiences grab the attention of live spectators, they also generated tons of media exposure. Ironically, by eschewing traditional up-front media spending Red Bull was able to generate much greater media impressions on the back end. As Mateschitz explained in a 2011 interview, “In literal financial terms, our sports teams are not yet profitable, but in value terms, they are. The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures.”25
The end goal of all marketing is the creation of empowering, inspiring memories. That’s because when it comes to making purchase decisions, it is the “remembering self” that decides, not the “experiencing self.” And nothing creates memories better than the simple, tried and true formula for unconscious branding employed so brilliantly by Red Bull. The three key experiential ingredients to the brand’s success are novelty, physical action, and emotional stimulation. By creating novel, engaging, physically and emotionally stimulating experiences, the brand became deeply seated in the unconscious minds of its audience, the part of the mind that determines behavioral responses and brand purchases.
Marketers are not the architects of advertising. They are the architects of remembrance. Whether designing a print ad, or creating a branded experience, we are making memories, not just marketing materials. How we feel about a brand largely depends upon our memory of the experience provided by the brand, not what actually happened. Recalling the elements that made it different, that moved us either physically or emotionally, we then formulate our judgments. These are not based on the reality of these experiences but almost entirely on the peak moments and the concluding impression—whether positive or negative—the brand has produced. This tendency is what the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman calls the “peak-end rule.” In other words, marketers need to create powerful, positive, peak physical and emotional experiences that leave their audience on a high note. Mateschitz masterminded the branding of these peak experiences, delivering the highest of possible highs that are aligned not only with the sensibilities of its high-energy customers but also the characteristics and benefits of the product. He tapped into their love of wild parties and extreme sports, creating the desire for a high-energy drink that would let them play the game of life harder and better. It was this formula for fun that made Mateschitz the wealthiest man in Austria, and Red Bull the most powerful brand in the rapidly growing energy drink market that he himself had created.
According to Forbes, in 2005 Red Bull commanded a massive 80 percent market share in some countries and a 47 percent share in the US, where sales were growing at an annual rate of about 40 percent.26 In 2010 the privately held company sold a total of 4,204 billion cans in over 161 countries, including over a billion in the US alone, earning Red Bull a total of 5.175 billion in revenue—a jump of 15.8 percent versus the previous year in a now highly competitive marketplace crowded with imitators desperate to get in on the action.27 And the truest measure of all success is not just the numbers but the enjoyment of the journey. Mateschitz insists that he has no plans to sell or take Red Bull public because, as he puts it, “It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of fun.”28
These nontraditional efforts have beat out even category-leading beverage behemoths at their own game. As Nancy F. Koehn, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School says, “In terms of attracting new customers and enhancing consumer loyalty, Red Bull has a more effective branding campaign than Coke or Pepsi. Red Bull is building a beverage brand without relying on the essential equipment of a mass-marketing campaign. Perhaps the indispensable tools of marketing aren’t so indispensable after all.”29
Humans have the unique capacity to change consciously, physically reinventing themselves by taking action to change both mind and body. Branding is not simply about changing our opinions, attitudes, or even our behavior; it is about changing our being. Just as one must learn through experience to become a football player, a chess player, or a world-class pianist, one will only become a loyal Starbucks patron through action, by doing things again and again until it is part of who you are. We go from perceiving to feeling to thinking to doing to finally becoming. By engaging in repeated action, the body literally becomes the unconscious mind. The brand becomes ingrained in our somatic markers, and its rituals become part of our muscle memory—that is the long-term, unconscious, and procedural motor learning by which brands are insinuated into the tissues of our being.
Another universal enduring truth that drives our need for action is that humans are the only species with a conscious understanding of the bittersweet plight that is existence. As the evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad maintains, “As far as we know, humans are the only species who experience existential angst due to the recognition of their mortality.”30 So much to do, so little time. Humans are uniquely blessed and cursed with this consciousness, an ability that not only confers on us the joy to fully embrace life in all its magnificent glory, but also the sobering realization that the party must some day end. As much as we may deny it, the thought looms large in the background of our behaviors, acting as a gnawing nudge that prompts us to get out and do something with our life so it doesn’t idly pass us by. Great brands are the prompts that encourage our instinctive resolve to take action and live life better and more fully.
Not only do brand loyalties save us time by making purchase choices easier, they also connect us to something more fulfilling beyond the product. Brands help us seize and squeeze more out of life’s moments. And lives, like brands, are not really nouns or things; they are verbs and processes, a series of actions over time. It’s not about the destination. It is about the path we walk on the way to that destination. The real purpose of branding is to help us make the most of that journey by invigorating life’s path with emotionally and physically gratifying moments along the way.
In 1974 psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted a study in which male participants were interviewed after they walked across one of two different bridges: one, a fear-arousing suspension bridge that swayed high above a deep ravine, and the other, a safer, stable, lower bridge that failed to induce much fear in the subjects. At the end of each bridge an attractive female surveyed the male subjects and offered her phone number if they had any follow-up questions. The experimenters found that the participants who walked over the scary bridge were more likely to call the woman and ask for a date. Dutton and Aron concluded that the participants who had walked across the suspension bridge had misattributed their physiologically aroused body states as signs of attraction for the female experimenter. More so than those participants who lacked the heightened feelings of physical stimulation on the safer bridge, the suspension bridge participants mistook their sweaty palms, racing pulses, and beating hearts as signs that they liked the woman.31
Through my own work as a behavior change therapist, I have seen that when strong emotions and recollections are brought to the surface in clients, those same clients can redirect and attribute those feelings toward me, their bystander-therapist. These feelings can range from contentment to outrage, depending on the emotions and memories that have been stirred. This phenomenon of transference was first labeled by Freud to describe when people unconsciously transfer their attitudes and feelings from one person or situation to another. It’s like when you meet someone at a party for the first time and something about him or her reminds you of one of your best friends from high school, or the friend who broke your heart in college. Without knowing anything about the person, you’ve already formed strong opinions that may have little basis in reality.
Because our relationships to brands are much like our relationships to people, a similar redirection of attitudes, emotions, and desires can take place with branded experiences. By these same mechanisms of misattribution and transference, a brand can become either the beneficiary or the collateral damage of someone’s prior experiences. We unconsciously ascribe the feelings generated and the people encountered in those previous events to the brand itself. People prefer Red Bull over a myriad of imitators not merely because of its arousing ingredients of sugar, caffeine, amino acids, and herbal stimulants, which other products in the energy drink category commonly share, but because of the exclusive, stimulating environments of Red Bull–sponsored events. If body states, or what Damasio refers to as somatic markers, are often the keys to decision making, then by creating and activating these states, we can unconsciously convince brand buyers and encourage loyalty.
Physiological arousal has the power to transform who we are and how we make decisions. The more passionate we become, the more likely we are to give in to the desires of our deeper and sometimes uncharacteristically primal urges. For instance, behavioral economists Dan Ariely and George Lowenstein have demonstrated that levels of sexual arousal can have a profound effect on decision making. Through a study conducted at Berkeley, they found that when male college students are in an impassioned state of heightened sexual arousal, they indicate a much greater propensity to engage in an action they would not ordinarily consider. These young men were more than twice as likely to predict that they would engage in immoral activities, and nearly twice as likely to predict that they would engage in a variety of somewhat odd sexual activities. As Ariely concludes, “Every one of us, regardless of how ‘good’ we are, under-predicts the effect of passion on our behavior.” He adds, “Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was.”32 Likewise, when we are in highly emotional and aroused states, we are much more prone to give in to our reptilian impulses, seeking the primal excitation of wild parties and the awe-inspiring amazement of crazed extreme sports.
As you might imagine, there is a big difference between a vicarious experience and attending the same event live. Even though the process of imagining an action involves the same neural circuitry as doing it, the intensity, richness, and vividness of that experience is never the same as when it is really happening to us. As much as we can imagine those same actions, we still know that they are not real. The discovery of mirror neurons has shed important light on this distinction. These neurons located in the frontal lobe are involved in processing empathy, imitation, and emulation. Activation of the mirror neurons is what primes the pump of desire, allowing us to vicariously envision and feel ourselves engaged in the behaviors and feelings of others. Though this is a prevailing technique employed by advertisers through the use of traditional media, these mirror neurons work best in real-life situations as compared to the shadowy substitutes delivered by broadcast, print, or digital advertising.33 In addition, when you observe someone else doing an action, only a small subset, roughly 20 percent, of these same motor neurons will fire in your brain.34 It is as if your brain is performing a virtual simulation of the other person’s behaviors. But as when you are playing a video game, as exciting as it may be, you still know that it’s not really real.
V. S. Ramachandran has expanded the theory of mirror neurons beyond motor neurons, to include sensations of touch and not just action. In other words, when you see someone being touched, neurons fire in your somatosensory cortex, located in the sensory region of your brain, which create empathy with the person being touched. Ramachandran explains that the reason you don’t experience the sensation as if it were really happening to you is because of feedback signals from your sensory touch and pain receptors in your skin. These signals are sent back to your brain, vetoing the sensation by declaring, “Don’t worry, you are not actually being touched.” You can empathize all you want knowing that this isn’t really happening, because to believe so would muddle and confuse your tactile perceptions.35
But Ramachandran has discovered a fascinating peculiarity that reveals profound insight into the universally social nature of our minds. If your arm is anesthetized so that you no longer can feel the sensation of touch, and you see someone being touched on their arm, you can actually feel it in your arm. Because you have no physical sensation due to the anesthesia, the feedback from your skin’s sensory receptors is unable to cancel out and reject the feeling of being touched. This same effect also happens to a person with an amputated limb. When the amputee sees someone else being touched, he can actually feel it in his phantom limb because he is missing the arm containing the skin’s sensory receptors, which would otherwise veto these sensory signals. Astonishingly, a person with phantom limb pain can actually experience relief of their pain symptoms by observing another person whose limbs are intact while they are being massaged. The amputee experiences the other person’s massage as if it was actually happening to himself.36
Ramachandran calls these empathetic neurons “Gandhi neurons,” arguing that all that separates ourselves from others is our skin. We really all are connected on a basic neurobiological basis, and in many ways we all share in a group consciousness of sorts. As Ramachandran puts it, “This is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. All that’s separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin; you experience that person’s touch in your mind. You’ve dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is, there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet; you’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is a whole chain of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness. And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience.”37
When we humans get together our neurons interact directly with the minds of others. Because of the nature of our shared sensory and physical experiences, which are accentuated and magnified through the power of group consciousness, the events that take place when we are among our tribal affiliates become more stimulating, more engaging, and often more memorable than when we are in isolation. This phenomenon is what likely contributes to our ability to vividly remember a live concert or sporting event, more so than if we had stayed home by ourselves, watching those same events online or on television. The power is in the sharing of the experience, which then emerges larger and more impressed in our minds.
Perhaps the greatest of humanity’s truths is that we all deeply seek these connecting experiences with each other. All humans share in this innate capacity to band together with others and form groups, an instinctive desire to forge these crucial reciprocal alliances. As Gad Saad says, “Belonging to a brand community . . . only serves to accentuate that feeling of belonging, which is a central element of any social species.” And after a seven-decades-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, psychiatrist George Vaillant concludes, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”38
To really understand human behavior you must take an ecological viewpoint, looking through the wider lens of the environmental context to include the social settings and not just the brain itself. Recall Herbert Simon’s metaphor of the brain as a pair of scissors. As psychologist and director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Gerd Gigerenzer, explains, “Just as one cannot understand how scissors cut by looking only at one blade, one will not understand human behavior by studying either cognition or the environment alone. This may seem to be common sense, yet much of psychology has gone a mentalist way, attempting to explain human behavior by attitudes, preferences, logic, or brain imaging, and ignoring the structure of the environments in which people live.”39
There is an alarming trend in some areas of neuromarketing to encourage a reductionist view of human behavior by seeking to identify and isolate the smallest parts of the brain and searching for answers within a three-pound lump of flesh examined within the isolation of laboratory testing environments. Neuromarketing pioneer Dr. Stephen Sands once told me that one of his clients had asked him where the luxury part of the brain was. No matter how deep you peer into the most advanced brain image scans or search at the molecular level, you simply will never find it. Localization of brain function and branding on this level is as absurd as it is impossible. For marketers and laypeople, however, this question is understandable. When in doubt, we often look inward into our own minds in an attempt to find answers, but because our lives are much greater than we are, our behaviors are also rooted in something much larger than our own brains.
Whether we are connecting to our soul mate, our children, our family, our friends, our team, our co-workers, our neighbors, our countrymen, or our brand community, every one of us is, at our deepest, most unconscious level, a social animal. Identification with and acceptance of others has been critical to our survival and happiness, which makes it no surprise that brands are the physical embodiments that represent this social acceptance and this social currency. Brands become empowered through the inspiring connections of people sharing with other people, a feeling amplified manifold through the collective consciousness of brand and group affiliation. When we buy a brand that does its job, we buy into that feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves. The objective of branding should not be to connect people to the company that sells stuff. The real role of unconscious branding is to connect people to other people. The brands that best dissolve these barriers are the ones that will not only be the most profitable but also among the most cherished.
Transform business operations into branding tools. The era of simply buying brand recognition, familiarity, and market share dominance through big, branded advertising and huge media budgets is long gone. That doesn’t mean brand advertising can no longer play a critical role, but it does mean that you need to rethink what your “brand advertising” entails. If your brand is being defined by your actions as a company, what are you doing to make those actions not just exercises in business operations but also tools in marketing? How does your brand experience match up and fit in with your marketing communications? Think of all those customer experiences not only as business opportunities but also as additional forms of messaging and media. What you do speaks volumes because it ultimately determines the experiences and impressions that your brand leaves with your prospects.
Get physical. Consider shifting some of your media budget to experiential marketing. Such branded events are often considered second-rate tactics and afterthoughts in the planning process, but they are fundamental to branding. Marketers need to do more than simply sponsor existing events. They need to create new ones that both demonstrate the brand’s strategy in action and provide real, tangible benefits to customers by representing the dimensions that differentiate the product. Start with your product and brand benefits and build an experience that matches hand-in-glove, much like Red Bull created high-energy experiences to match their high-energy drinks.
Design memories. When you are designing brand experiences, such as the purchase process, the online user experience, or customer service interactions, use the “peak-end rule” suggested by Kahneman.40 When identifying ways to improve these processes, clearly define the peak experience you wish to create, and how you can conclude the total experience on the best possible note. What can you do to surprise and delight your customers? How can you leave them satisfied and wanting more? Both criteria will weigh disproportionately high in their overall brand impression, and poor delivery along either dimension can negate or compromise the brand experience. For instance, a flawless, first-rate stay at a resort hotel punctuated with the unexpected delivery of flowers and a free bottle of champagne will all be quickly forgotten if you screw up the in-room breakfast dining order on the day of departure.
Be consistent in product delivery. Because the unconscious mind becomes programmed by repetition of the exact same action over and over again, make sure your brand interactions are identical across touch points. This is not just the look and feel of your communications, but the manner in which the customer physically interacts with your product or service. For example, Starbucks customers know the drill no matter what city or town they are in. Model every retail, brand, and purchase experience after a single ideal experience and replicate it identically throughout the network.
Leverage social brands. Social media is all the rage in marketing these days—both the medium and the message are about our nature as social animals. Before we think about using social or even traditional media, we first must remember that it is the brand that is communal in nature. We need to put the human before the app or ad, and the cart before the horse. Before developing creative and media plans, particularly of the social variety, you need to identify the social DNA of your brand. What are the traits that are being displayed by category users? And what motivating and differentiating traits would you like your customers to display as outcomes of purchasing your brand? What common collective experiences does your brand empower? In the end, you need to inspire deep meaningful connections between your customers and other people, improving their life success on the way to improving your business success.
Leverage these seven steps. This process is intended not only to inspire marketing communications but also to precede and inform strategy development. Before you develop your brand strategy, write these seven steps on a single sheet of paper and fill in briefly what has to happen to accomplish each. What is the convention or pattern your brand needs to interrupt to get noticed? What needs to be done to make people comfortable to consider buying it? What do you want them to imagine as the benefits and outcomes of buying and using your brand? What are the key emotions and feelings you need to shift to gain interest? What logical support points help them overcome their resistance to buying the brand? What brand associations do you need to change or reinforce? And how can you physically engage your audience beyond just communications to experience your brand so that they may understand how it can make their lives better? With this as a backdrop, your strategy development process will become much more focused, empowered, inspired, and actionable.
Recognize these seven steps. Every day we wake up wearing two hats: marketer and customer. We sell our wares in the market, we sell ourselves in our social groups, and we participate as so-called consumers. Now that you are aware of the influence of these seven steps—interrupt the pattern; create comfort; lead the imagination; shift the feeling; satisfy the critical mind; change the associations; take action—you will find real world evidence of them everywhere. Buyer and seller beware.
The goal of this book is to uncover these patterns in our nature and our cultures so that we all can leverage them, and are not leveraged by them. Only through conscious knowledge of this process can we begin to make better brands and make better-informed purchase decisions. The brands that prevail amidst this leveled playing field of equally enlightened marketers and customers will be those that create real value. When we all are aware of the real causes of our deeds, we can inspire real progress on both sides of the free market fence.