Consumer Brain Insights for Effective Marketing
The Triune Brain in Marketing
Reptilian Brain: Survival Instincts
This is the oldest part of the brain, responsible for survival functions and instinct. It reacts to sensory stimuli and seeks to avoid pain and gain pleasure.
Marketing Application: Address consumers’ most fundamental needs and fears. Messages should emphasize security, safety, and basic necessities.
Example: Limited-time offers or highlighting the reliability and durability of a product can trigger feelings of security in the consumer.
Limbic System: The Emotional Brain
Responsible for processing emotions, memory, and social interactions/connections.
Marketing Application: Create emotionally engaging content. Use storytelling to foster positive associations so consumers feel connected to the products.
Example: Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign evoked emotions related to personal connections. Customers were encouraged to buy bottles with the names of loved ones, creating a sense of emotional attachment to the brand.
Neocortex: Rational Thinking
This is the most advanced part of the brain, responsible for complex cognitive functions like reasoning, problem-solving, and language.
Marketing Application: Provide clear and rational information. Highlight features and benefits to support the product’s value in a way that aligns with the customer’s logical thinking.
Example: Volvo details technical specifications concerning safety, efficiency, and engine performance. This appeals to customers who make purchasing decisions based on an analysis of these specifications.
The Intuitive Consumer and Cognitive Effort
Consumers often act as “brain misers,” seeking to avoid spending excessive energy and mental effort on decisions. The amount of cognitive activity needed influences the choice. Consequently, consumer decisions are frequently made intuitively, below the level of conscious awareness.
Familiarity vs. Novelty in Choices
- Familiarity: Preferred because it requires less cognitive effort. Consumers exposed to familiar brands are more likely to make favorable intuitive choices. Marketing Application: Build brand recognition through frequent exposure, consistent branding, and memorable slogans.
- Novelty: New and surprising products capture attention and trigger intuitive curiosity. Marketing Application: Introduce new products or packaging that grab attention and are unique. This can engage the intuitive consumer, as new things signal novelty and excitement, helping the product stand out.
Efficiency and Decision Shortcuts
The brain conserves mental energy by making decisions as efficiently as possible. Consumers look for shortcuts in the decision-making process. Marketing Application: Provide clear and concise product information, easy website navigation, and intuitive product packaging. Highlighting key benefits is crucial.
Relationship Between Novelty and Familiarity
- Attention & Engagement: Novelty captures initial attention and sparks interest, helping a product stand out. Familiarity helps sustain interest long-term, providing comfort and recognition.
- Cognitive Efficiency: Novelty demands more cognitive effort as it requires processing and understanding new information. Familiarity is mentally efficient, relying on established mental schemas and requiring less cognitive load.
Mere Exposure Effect in Marketing
The Mere Exposure Effect is a psychological concept used in advertising and marketing to understand consumer behavior. It suggests that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are exposed to them repeatedly.
- Repetition & Familiarity: The more someone is exposed to a stimulus (like an image, brand name, or jingle), the more familiar it becomes. As familiarity increases, individuals may develop preferences for these familiar items over unfamiliar ones.
- Reduction of Uncertainty: Mere exposure can reduce the uncertainty and discomfort associated with the unknown. When customers encounter a brand or product repeatedly (e.g., through advertisements or logos), they become more comfortable with it, which can influence purchasing decisions.
- Implicit Memory: Exposure to a brand or product can lead to automatic processing in the brain. This subconscious processing can influence preferences and choices without conscious awareness.
Priming and Its Link to Memory
Priming is a non-conscious brain process that occurs quickly, automatically, and effortlessly. It involves a mental process called associative activation, where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious guidance or intention.
How Priming Influences Recall
- Memory Retrieval: Priming can impact memory retrieval by making specific information or memories more accessible. Exposure to a prime makes it easier to recall related information from long-term memory. Example: Seeing the word “Apple” might prime thoughts of taste, color, or health benefits.
- Semantic Priming: Words that are related in meaning facilitate the recognition of other related words. Example: The word “yellow” might prime related concepts like “sun” or “banana.”
- Associative Priming: This involves the activation of related concepts linked through associations, not just semantic meaning. It is often used in advertising and marketing. Example: An advertisement featuring a tropical vacation might prime you with images of beaches and sand, making you more likely to remember and associate the brand with the idea of a beach vacation.
Understanding Consumer Attention Types
- Arousal: The general level of activation and alertness, whether tired or energized.
- Focused Attention: The ability to concentrate attention on a single stimulus, allowing for detailed analysis (e.g., analyzing a product from different viewpoints in a quiet setting).
- Sustained Attention: The ability to maintain attention on a stimulus over an extended period (e.g., reading a book for hours without distraction).
- Selective Attention: The ability to attend to a specific stimulus while ignoring other distracting stimuli (e.g., listening to a lecture in a noisy classroom by focusing on the speaker’s voice).
- Alternating Attention: The ability to shift focus between two or more stimuli (e.g., a student taking notes alternates between listening to the teacher and writing).
- Divided Attention: The ability to attend to different stimuli or tasks simultaneously; multitasking capacity (e.g., driving while talking on the phone).
- Top-Down Attention: Intentional allocation of attention, driven by internal goals (e.g., scanning a crowded room to find a friend).
- Bottom-Up Attention: Attention captured involuntarily by external stimuli (e.g., a sudden loud noise or bright flash).
- Novelty Detection & Surprise: The tendency to pay attention to new or unexpected things.
- Expensive for the Miser Brain: Paying attention requires cognitive resources; we cannot afford to pay deep attention for long durations or to too many things simultaneously.
Types of Memory and Forgetting
- Immediate/Sensory Memory: Lasts only milliseconds; we are often unaware of it.
- Short-Term Memory (Working Memory): Lasts a few seconds to minutes. Information is held as long as it’s needed for the current task.
- Long-Term Memory: Where we store facts, ideas, experiences, and stories. Information passes through distinct stages to be stored here.
Why Do We Forget?
- Failure to store the memory properly.
- Interference from other memories.
- Motivated forgetting (suppression).
- Retrieval failure (inability to access stored information).
Circumflex Model: Mapping Emotions
The Circumflex Model of Emotions is a psychological framework used to describe and categorize emotions. It provides a visual representation of how emotions relate to each other based on core characteristics.
It typically involves dimensions such as:
- Valence: The positivity or negativity of the emotion (pleasant vs. unpleasant).
- Arousal: The intensity of the emotion (high energy vs. low energy).
- Motivation (sometimes included): The action orientation (approach vs. avoidance).
Multisensory Branding Experiences
Defining the Multisensory Brand
A multisensory brand engages and appeals to multiple human senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—to create a more immersive and memorable brand experience.
Example: A coffee shop that serves great-tasting coffee (taste), plays soothing music (sound), has a warm and comfortable ambiance (touch and sight), and fills the air with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee (smell) creates a powerful multisensory brand experience.
Sensory Brand Experience (SBE) Explained
SBE (Sensory Brand Experience) refers to the internal processing of brand-related sensory data encountered within a brand setting. This involves an entrainment of exteroceptive (external senses) and interoceptive (internal body state) processes, resulting in brand sensations, brand affects (emotions), and a subjective feeling state. SBE focuses on generating marketing value through the strategic use of the five types of sensory stimulation.
Theoretical Perspectives on SBE
- Ecological Perspective: Emphasizes the dynamic interdependence of living systems within their environment.
- Embodiment Perspective: Posits that experiences are grounded in bodily states; affective activities are perturbations in our biological stratum.
- Phenomenological Perspective: Focuses on experiences grounded in the subjective lifeworld, including needs, motivations, and fantasies.
SBE Process: Antecedent, Processing, Outcome
The brand setting (the space/environment the company creates) transforms into brand sensations when the consumer enters. This interaction creates brand affects, linking the senses with the brand identity.
- ANTECEDENT – Brand Setting: What the brand presents sensorially. Our receptors gather this information, which is then translated by the brain.
- INSTINCT PROCESSING – Brand Sensation: Neurophysiological data about the brand, instantiated at the interaction point between brand stimuli and sensory receptors.
- Exteroceptive Data: Information from the external environment perceived through sensory organs (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch).
- Interoceptive Data: Sensory information originating from inside the body (e.g., body temperature, heart rate, gut feelings).
- NON-REPRESENTATIONAL OUTCOME:
- Disturb: SBE can disturb the straightforward transfer of brand meaning by directing bodily attention to its immediate sensory conditions.
- Bias: Feeling states generated by SBE can bias the perceived meaning of the brand, often by amplifying salient (relevant/noticeable) brand attributes.