Can brands appeal to our unconscious mind?
What does it take to build a distinctive brand and create strong bias among consumers’ unconscious minds? It depends on what category you’re playing in, writes Rebecca Drummond, but it’s rarely achieved through advertising alone.
On an average day, we make more than 35,000 decisions – and only 5% of these are conscious. The challenge for marketers is: how do you ensure your brand is distinctive enough to steal one of those spots, and how much value is there in appealing to the unconscious side of our minds?
Barely a week passes before the release of a new behavioural or neuro study claiming to have gone a little further into the depths of our mind, to understand the process behind the way we make decisions. A running theme of these studies is that how ‘warm’ someone already feels towards your brand can have a tremendous impact on the final purchase decision.
As psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman explored in his influential book, Thinking Fast and Slow, humans naturally look for ways to associate new information with existing patterns or thoughts, rather than having to create new patterns for each new experience. We rely firstly on how we feel and what we already know by dusting off information gathered in the subconscious.
Nice article on the positive impacts of brand building and the role of bias. The biggest issue this industry faces is the impact of our creative people and marketers’ unconscious bias, leading to creative work that is doing brand damage and missing the mark with the customer. If we don’t have the segmentation done right up front and the creative execution done with respect to the now and future customer,, then all the good work that this article covers is undone.
“The biggest issue this industry faces is the impact of our creative people and marketers’ unconscious bias”
The BIGGEST issue? Source please?
PEACE
Anne Miles, you’re bang on the money! When marketers and creatives keep their subconscious in check, we see less stereotyping, more diversity, and subsequently – more inclusion. I’m sure this benefits the bottom line of every brand embracing this approach.
Great article too. Thank you Rebecca 🙂
Nicely written; cogent and succinct.
*Subconscious
This is very well written and insightful, I feel like brand magic is made when you use clever insights like the ones above to help brands find that point of differentiation to help them get into, or keep them in, the top 3 that you mentioned. it’s definitely food for thought, thanks.