The role of marketing is to capture attention, a job that’s becoming more difficult as the amount of content and advertisements people are exposed to increases each day. But could the key to standing out be in learning more about the way the brain works?
We all like to think we’re in control of the decisions we make, but we aren’t. We’re not suggesting it’s all Derren Brown, but we can learn a few things from those who know a cerebral cortex from an amygdala.
The human brain is incredibly powerful, according to research (backed by Elon Musk) it’s been calculated that the human brain is 30x more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer (and it’s more energy efficient #ClimateChange).
The same research calculated that if you were running a super-computer to complete tasks your running costs would be around $100 per hour. If your brain was paid the same output rate, it’d earn more than $5,000 per hour.
But before we’re all patting each other on the back for having such fantastic processing power, let’s address the problem with the brain; it’s flawed. It’s not rational. We don’t make decisions as we “should”.
But that’s good news for marketers, it’s an opportunity…
We all like to think that we’re pretty rational when it comes to decision making. We are in control of the decisions we make; what to wear, what to eat, how to act or what to buy.
But it’s not as clear cut as that:
Decision-making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity.
A team of scientists has unravelled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions.
Science Daily
Scientific research suggests that our subconscious is able to process up to 11,000,000 ‘bits’ per second, meanwhile our conscious mind is only able to process up to 60 ‘bits’ per second.
Which makes sense given the amount of information we’d have to take in every second; from the smell of the room, to the sound of the building, to the feeling of your feet on the floor. Imagine having to consciously process all of these things. Information overload.
But given the role of the subconscious, perhaps it should be at the front of our mind.
95% of our purchase decision making
takes place in the subconscious mind.
Gerald Zaltman, Harvard Business School
So how can marketers appeal to the subconscious of our audience?
Whether you’re looking to get your audience as emotional as Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, or as angry as Cantona during the 94/95 season, it’s time to get them emotionally engaged.
Emotions are a fundamental requirement to decision making, without it, the ability to make decisions would be halted. They’re the stepping stones to help the brain make up its mind.
So as marketers, if you aren’t looking to evoke an emotional reaction from your audience, you’re making it harder for them to make a decision.
Look at the most successful companies’ advertising campaigns over recent years; Apple and Nike are cited as ‘successful’. Their campaigns ALWAYS major on evoking some sort of emotion from the audience, very rarely going into technical spec, until later.
Imagine spending months on a 10,000 piece jigsaw to find the final piece is missing. The frustration, the anger!
Our brains need closure, it’s how we make decisions. Continuing to raise questions and answer them (subconsciously) in order to build up a picture before taking the plunge. To continue the analogy, each question answered forms one piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
The same premise should apply to your marketing and campaigns, whether it’s your website, social feed, content magnets or ads, they should pre-empt the questions the audiences may have and answer them.
While we can’t actively control all the information our subconscious soaks up each second, we can lead it in particular avenues and influence the process.
The more information your brain takes in the easier it finds it to make decisions. If it stalls when taking in information, it creates friction, slowing the decision making process. Known as cognitive fluency, it’s how your brain jumps from one ‘stepping stone’ to another through its processing.
The easier the information can be processed, the better. Not just in terms of speed, but also the physical feeling of the individual while processing the information.
Have you ever had to read something 2-3 times before you actually ‘got it’? Readers often struggle on pricing pages, left needing a PhD in mathematics to understand how much it’s going to cost each month, or on content that seems so complex it just didn’t seem to go in, leaving you tongue-tied, confused and a bit pissed off.
Your content should be simple, easy to digest, fast and frictionless; it’ll help your audience process the information (in both parts of the brain), and reduce the pain of decision making.
“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”
Albert Einstein
The smoother your brand interactions sit with your audience, the more affinity people feel towards your brand. Your audience is quick to floccinaucinihilipilification* and first impressions are made in less than half a second. Every touch point matters.
*Yes, we used this word on purpose. That look on your face when you read it, the pulling back of your head, the scrunching of your eyebrows. That’s what you want to avoid. Keep it simple.
Remember story time as a child? Settling down, getting the same book off the shelf and having someone read to you until you fell asleep. Magical times.
While most of us no longer get to enjoy storytime, our brains still use stories to form memories, the little narratives we wrap around facts to form memories.
Not only does it help us to form memories, but it also gets our neurons all fired up too.
Research from Spain found that storytelling doesn’t just get the memory or language activated, but it also had an impact on our other senses too!
When people read stories about someone drinking an ice-cold crisp beer, with the sun on their skin and the sand in between their toes, they don’t just form a memory around the story, it activates several parts of the brain.
It also awakens other senses too, like the salivary glands. Our brains can’t distinguish between hearing a story about something and experiencing it for ourselves.
Caveat: I doubt this’ll work if your 4 year old asks you for an ice cream and you tell them someone else eating one is just as good as them eating one. We’ll let you test that one out.
People are 22 times more likely to remember
a fact when it has been wrapped in a story
As to the value of pictures over text, that’s not our argument, what we can all agree on is that our brains process images much faster than text.
But, as you may have figured in this blog, images can also be used to trick or steer the brain.
Whether you’re trying to make your audience happy by showing them people smiling or laughing, utilising aspects by showing a large building from ground up, or increasing the stature of a person’s presence to show confidence, the images we see evoke emotions as to how we should feel.
As to how much visuals can trick the brain, a French academic from 2001 got 54 of the best wine experts together for a study. He poured them all a glass of wine and asked them to describe it, individually, in private.
The glass of wine was red. But only in colour.
He’d sneakily put red dye into white wine, therefore changing its colour to red.
Surely, this world recognised group of experts couldn’t be tricked?
How many of the 54 TOP EXPERTS IN THE WORLD described the wine as you would a white rather than a red?
0. It tricked them all.
Sure, it made Brochet a neuroscience legend, but the wine world hated him, he’d proved he could trick the world’s greatest into confusing a Lambrini with a Latour. And best of all, apparently Brochet is now… a wine producer.
P.S. The trend in our research being focussed around wines is nothing to do with Rich currently residing in the rolling hills of Tuscany not far from an amazing vineyard…
So don’t believe everything you see. Although, chances are, you can’t actually control it.
By now you’re already aware that the brain doesn’t actually want choices. It needs to form a decision and go with it, yet when it comes to pricing we’re so often left pulling our hair out (sorry, Rich).
This is where anchoring is used perfectly. Anchoring is showing the audience a number of options but having already steered them into having an affinity for one of the options, meaning all comparisons and negotiations are compared to the original, ‘the anchor’.
You may have seen this on pricing pages. Here’s ASANA’s page, rather than being left with a decision to make we know which one they’re suggesting.
Chances are you’ve already experienced this in your life multiple times, either knowingly or unknowingly. Heck, you may have even done this during a pitch with the old “three options” trick.
Real-world example
While we won’t question the ethics on this one, psychologist Robert Levine tested anchoring in the real-world.
A rumour was circulated among a cable provider’s customers that suggested subscription prices were to increase $10 per month for existing users. The company then responded later, clarifying the rumours stating that the rates were only increasing by $2 per month. The effect?
The customers lapped it up and thought they were getting a good deal, they still thought they were $8 better off, rather than $2 down.
The brain is a weird and wonderful thing, but it’s not perfect. As we learn more about the way it makes decisions and what it likes/dislikes, we should adapt our marketing accordingly. We should be striving to test things until they break, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and applying this context to everything we do.
It’s our job as marketers to capture the attention and to make everything as seamless as possible for our audience.
Understanding the impact of neuromarketing will reward us with better engagement, better CTRs and increased conversions but most importantly, a better experience for the buyer.