We’ve just looked into our heads, and we may find ourselves nearing this conclusion: We’re out of our minds.

We could excuse our foolishness—Dick Clark insisting that the Beatles would never fly, for example, and NBA players insisting that Kobe can—by recognizing that most of what we call thinking isn’t. During our decision making, the organ that processes our data sits on the sidelines while our feelings do the work. When our feelings reach their decision, they summon our brains to come in and draft the rationale, a task it does so well that it manages to convince us that it’s right—and that it was in charge the whole time.

Rational or emotional, do we ever grow up? We fight age, trying to live the Dylan wish that we stay forever young. We still love to play. Apple, Cuisinart, and the Mini Cooper turn phones, blenders, and cars into toys, and we crave them. The marketer who wants to thrive today asks, “How can I make this playful?”

From birth, we love surprises. Pose us a riddle—name our search engine Yahoo! or Google, for example—and we need to know the answer. Add a surprise to something familiar to us—a computer shaped like an egg and colored like a grape—and we inch closer to the cash register with it in hand.

One of our first long words is “story,” and for good reason; we crave stories. Our movies, our songs, our evening news, our favorite television program of all time—they all are stories. The best marketers find their stories and they follow the ancient motto of McCann-Erickson: “The Truth well told.” Those who try to make it up suffer the backlash that comes from our contempt for anyone who tries to fool us.

We want to be a part. As David Riesman noted in his 1959 classic The Lonely Crowd, we are “other-directed.” We obsess over polls and best-seller lists because they reveal what others are thinking. The founders of Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace knew how much we dread loneliness and crave the respect and company of others. Of the three, Facebook appears to be the one true social gathering spot that will survive because it’s the most “a part of” medium. Sell a motorcycle, and you sell some motorcycles; sell a motorcycle club, and you sell far more.

Yet we want to be apart, too. Gold is good, platinum even better. Nike shoes are good; our very own Nike shoes—or a Toyota Scion, with all its accessories—are even better. Like Malcolm Gladwell, the shrewd marketer realizes this and speaks not to all of us but to each one of us: “Where do you want to go today?”

We crave the familiar. Our ancestors survived because of that: They had to fear anything new—large men uttering an odd language, for example. It’s a risk, then, to offer us something too new, as Mary Tyler Moore and 60 Minutes learned, as magazines learn every time they introduce a new design, and as Tropicana learned when it changed its packaging too dramatically. So today’s marketer knows the key: Be just familiar enough. Apple introduces the Shuffle and flourishes because it feels familiar: We understand on-off and volume switches.

Our preference for the familiar suggests that brands will dominate this century, just as they did the previous one. We’re all the Chicagoans who want their Marshall Field’s, even if it’s actually a Macy’s, to be a Marshall Field’s; we want what we know. Because we are uniquely impatient and have less time to choose among more products to choose from, brands represent simple, fast, and safe choices—and we crave simple, fast, and safe.

But new brands will emerge, and quickly if they give us what we love most: a unique and satisfying experience. It’s happening already, of course: Facebook and Twitter are just two examples of services so new and attractive that they became forceful brands in months. That’s today’s Killer Brand: the unique, and uniquely satisfying, product.

We experience the world through our senses, particularly our eyes; we think with them. From childhood, we learn that beautiful is good for us; spots, rough edges, and discolorations are all signals of danger, and smooth is safe. Beauty tricks us from our childhoods, casting a halo that makes us give scholarships to football players who use PowerPoint. Colors change us, too; they make hockey teams play more aggressively or make hockey referees more biased against teams in black—or perhaps they do both.

We shape things and then they shape us; we unclutter a neighborhood, and traffic fatalities soon drop dramatically. Design is a force, and it will grow as our products continue to mature and our choices grow in number; design breaks ties among our choices, and our world overflows with choices. Design has become the great value-added feature; we think with our eyes.

We love beauty, and nothing looks more beautiful to us than something simple. Today we will take twenty minutes to figure out a product. If we’re still confused, we’re driving back to the store with the receipt; we haven’t got time for the pain. Simple is the new beautiful; complicated is the new defective.

But of all forces, none surpasses reputation. Reputations do not merely seduce us into choosing things; reputations change our experiences. If we think a concoction will sprout hair, for example, we soon see hair. Reputations also make us laugh when a humorist mourns the death of an old friend, make us prefer Coke when our taste buds adore Pepsi, and make our feet throb when we think six-inch nails are sticking through them. Reputations create our expectations, and our expectations change our perceptions.

We see that few trends are trends; most are fads that start to decline almost from the second we spot them. Fads come and go, and marketers eager to endure look beyond them and ask the question at the heart of this book: What leads us to choose what we choose?

This book has been my attempt to understand that better, by peeking into the most complex force in the universe: our minds. A few readers might disagree, arguing that physicists face more puzzling questions every day. They don’t. Ask a few Ph.D.s in physics, and eventually you will learn something startling: The possible interactions of neurons in our brains outnumber all the particles in our universe.

So speaking of surprises, just think about that.

For the last fourteen years, I have argued that Marketing’s goal is to reduce an enterprise’s sales and advertising costs toward zero; to perform so well at the five must-dos—conceiving, designing, positioning, naming, and packaging—that little else is needed. If we learn later that we must do more—that we need to push—our problem isn’t with our media or message; it’s with our product.

And our solution isn’t Twittering, Facebooking, or any form of “engaging the customer” that doesn’t enhance peoples’ experience. It’s creating what people love. It’s ingenious products like the Adidas micoach shoe, which makes the shoe more service—a coaching, training, and record-keeping service—than shoe; and the equally clever Polyvore website, which lets visitors mix and match clothes and accessories from twenty different store websites and share their concoctions and thoughts with the six-million-and-growing Polyvore fashion community.

This book has tried to find some patterns in our fascinating complexity and share them with you. If it has done nothing else, I hope this book has thumped you on your head a few times. It certainly has me; it’s made me think, made me wonder, and made me smile.

If it has done that to you, too, that’s all I could hope for—except to say thank you, and my best to you,

Harry Beckwith