Brand Blink: Understanding the Mind to get to the Heart of
Buying Decisions
By Daryl
Travis, CEO, Brandtrust
Malcolm Gladwell
enlightens our thinking
with his book Blink, a fascinating exploration of how
decisions are made in the blink of an eye, before consumers even realize
they’re making a decision. He suggests “we think without thinking.”
Gladwell’s effort to share emerging insights into how our
brains work is timely. In this decade, we are learning more about how humans
think and feel and what drives our behavior than the whole of our
discoveries in the time since Sigmund Freud dreamt up the idea of
psychoanalysis. This has profound implications for marketing and brand
professionals. As it turns out, these developments are revealing just how
faulty and inadequate conventional research methods are when it comes to
truly understanding consumers.
WHAT’S BEHIND
BLINK?
In Blink, Gladwell urges that people make decisions through rapid
cognition and a concept known as thin-slicing—the ability of our unconscious
to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of
experience. More than we realize, we evaluate a situation or a brand and
frame our response before we ever consciously think about it. When we
thin-slice, we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this
process of editing unconsciously. We first see and perceive a color several
hundred milliseconds before we can think or say “red light.” Our foot seeks
the brake long before we actually think about stopping, that is, if we think
about it at all.
As Gladwell warns, “while people are very willing and very
good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those
explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous
opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily
correct. Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should
be easy. But the truth is that it isn’t, and the people who run focus groups
and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact” (Gladwell,
2005, p. 155).
FINDING BLINK
Brains are pattern machines. (Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2004) These patterns
make blink moments possible. But, if you are a marketer looking to
capitalize on a blink phenomenon, be aware the brain cannot command itself
to go into “think blink” mode. Instead, it involuntarily retrieves from
memory the feelings that drive blink encounters. Our brain does not remember
exactly what it sees, hears or feels. We don’t remember or recall things
with complete fidelity—not because the cortex and its neurons are sloppy or
error-prone, but because the brain remembers the important relationships in
the world, independent of details. (Hawkins, 2004)
The relationships we feel are important in our world are
stored as images in our unconscious mind and are linked directly to our
emotions. In fact, we don’t really think in words, but more in pictures or
images. The brain is elegantly designed to store whole concepts within an
image. We store memories as images because they are more meaningful and
easier to access quickly and automatically. Emotions are largely responsible
for creating these memories and are the key to unlocking the meaning within.
It is critical for marketers to understand the role of
emotions in human decision making and behavior. Raised in Western culture,
we are well indoctrinated in the forces of logic and reason, but we’ve lost
sight of the essential role emotions play in determining human behavior. In
fact, all human behavior is driven by emotional input derived from these
stored visualizations. There are two systems in the brain. One is for logic
and reason. It resides in the neocortex, the outer layer. The other is
found in the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain. The emotional
components appear in very discreet, well-identified and interconnected
regions of the brain. The interconnection occurs in a handful of brain sites
that are collectively known as the limbic system. One site in the system,
the amygdala, is the brain region responsible for the subjective experience
of the emotion. Another site, the hypothalamus, is responsible for
triggering the physiological response of the emotion.
The hypothalamus, amygdala, and cortex all feed back on each
other in a complex alchemy of emotion and reason to coordinate the
appropriate behavioral response. This information is also saved and stored
by a third member of the limbic system, the hippocampus. All of these brain
regions, from the higher cortex to lower limit systems, converge in a single
brain region known as the cingulate cortex. It is in the cingulate cortex
that decisions are made. Reason and emotion commingle and we are able to
coordinate our emotional response to direct our actions and thoughts.
One very important scientific aspect of this whole process is
that we know the decision making process does not work in the absence of an
emotional signal from the limbic system. Left to its own devices, the
consciously thinking part of the
brain is incapable of making a decision. The implications of
this
for marketers are inescapable.
FROM THE HEAD TO
THE HEART
Revealing patterns in the brain through a methodology called Emotional
Research, a psychoanalytic-based technique designed to tap into memories,
makes it possible for consumers to access emotions that drive their
behaviors. Through directed relaxation and visualization exercises,
consumers can recall experiences and reveal underlying emotions that cannot
be accessed via conventional research. Visualization is critical to
unlocking the emotional drivers. Jim Hawkins, creator of Palm and Handspring
and the founder of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, discussed this in his
provocative book, On Intelligence. “The next time you tell a story,
step back and consider how you can only relate one aspect of the tale at a
time. You cannot tell me everything that happened all at once, no matter how
quickly you talk or I listen. You need to finish one part of the story
before you can move on to the next. This isn’t only because spoken language
is serial; written, oral and visual storytelling all convey a narrative in
serial fashion. It is because the story is stored in your head in sequential
fashion and can only be recalled in the same sequence. You can’t remember
the entire story at once. In fact, it’s almost impossible to think of
anything complex that isn’t a series of events or thoughts” (p. 70).
You can easily experience firsthand how Emotional Research
works as you read this. Follow these steps as described. First, think about
a time and place when you were very relaxed. Close your eyes so you can see
it better. In your mind, go to that time and place. Now, scan the scene very
slowly from left to right and describe what you are seeing. Notice all the
little details. Who is there with you? What time of day is it? What colors
do you see? What is the light like? What are you thinking about? What are
you feeling?
Now, did you go to the beach or some body of water as we see
most of the population do in our research? This is because the desire to be
near water is very primal human behavior and a clear indication how this
research can powerfully tap into the underlying emotional drivers.
FINDING BRAND
BLINK
Emotional Research, like in Brandtrust’s Emotional Inquirysm,
reveals the elements that create a brand or a blink experience. The directed
visualizations of the experiences that first encoded the emotion in a
person’s memory banks are essential. This unlocks the memories, the emotions
and the feelings that influence people’s behavior when faced with a similar
experience. For the purpose of brand research, imperfect recall is not an
issue. We are simply trying to uncover how the subject feels about a
particular experience related to the brand because those feelings drive his
or her behavior.
We discover the specific things that actually cause an
emotional response related to blink or brand experiences. The sound of your
mother’s voice, a picture of your grandmother’s house, the memory of the
loss of a loved one, the aroma of a favorite food, and thousands of other
experiences trigger emotional responses.
We also explore the deeper feelings of the emotion and how
they invoke behaviors that make up the landscape of all of our psychological
experiences. Revealing these emotional responses, common to most people,
provides the insights into what a brand must say and do to succeed.
As a result, we’re confirming brands are about
feelings, not facts. Buying decisions are made on promises that
transcend products, and promises are rooted in human emotions. Quite
simply, brands are built on trust. Making and keeping promises builds trust
which is among the most basic of human emotions. To impact our company’s
bottom line, we need to get in touch with our customers’ emotions. As
marketers, we must have our own blink moments and embrace the reality that
branding is about “brain surgery” and psychology. Because how your customers
feel about your brand isn’t a casual question. It is the crucial
question.
SOURCES:
Gladwell, M. (2005), Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
New York:
Little, Brown and Company.
Hawkins, J. and Blakeslee, S. (2004), On Intelligence: How
a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly
Intelligent Machines.
New York:
Times Books.
Wilson,
T. (2002), Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.
Boston:
Belknap Harvard.
Daryl Travis is CEO of Brandtrust in Chicago (www.brandtrust.com)
and author of “Emotional Branding: How Successful Brands Gain the
Irrational Edge.”
 |
