4 Tips for Marketers

What all marketers need to know about this new thinking:

  • Human beings are wonderfully irrational. As much as we aspire to be rational in all situations our brains are just not wired that way. We are continually using short cuts (heuristics and bias) to make sense of the world about us.
  • Emotion underpins all brand decision-making. You have an emotional reaction to a brand stimulus before you have a ‘thinking’ one. Even when you are thinking about different brand choices it is on constant reference to the perceived emotional pay-back of each option.
  • What we perceive as our conscious selves is in fact just a very small part of what is going on in our brains all the time. The vast majority of what our brains do goes on underneath the radar of consciousness.
  • Brands are really associative neuronal networks of interrelated concepts. Studies show that we can store well over 10,000 brand networks in our brains. A particular brand comes to attention when one part of the network is triggered in a more meaningful way than a competitor. Marketing is really about building and triggering of these networks.
    • Impact on Approach
    
Take a minute to think about what this means for brands, marketing and insight generation…

      

    • Since our conscious selves do not have a very good grasp on why we do things - asking people why they buy brands (in a focus groups or online questionnaire) is not giving us a very complete picture.
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    • Traditional research techniques (such as rating scales) that require thinking (engage the thinking, pre-frontal cortex) are not going to be good measures of what really matters – emotion.
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    • Marketers now have a broader range of levers to achieve business objectives. It is not just about communicating facts. The context of sharing information can have as much influence on the outcome as the actual information itself.
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    • Brand building and brand triggering at the Moment of Truth are not the same thing. Brand can and should be strategically integrated along the whole path to purchase.
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    • We need to re-think our research toolbox to take in this new reality. There is no magic bullet (don't believe the neuro-hype) but new technology together with best practice from before brings us much closer to fully understanding consumers than we have ever been before.
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