The brain wants to feel good, to avoid pain, to feel secure, to get rewards and so on. Each of these brain states corresponds to levels of (and combinations of) neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, oxytocin, vasopressin, testosterone, ostrogen, BDNF, etc., in the brain. Optimal levels of these neurotransmitters lead to feel good’, ‘feel secure’, etc., sentiments and are linked to stimuli in the environment. So the brain looks for these stimuli to get the required rewards.
Each of these objectives in the brain leads to improvement in the well-being of the organism. When the customer drives the BMW that he had been eyeing for the past year on a road holiday, he feels rewarded, his dopamine levels go up, he feel good. When she buys ‘comfort’ food, like Maggi, for instance, she feels secure and her serotonin levels go up. When the salaried employee invests his bonus through a relationship manager that he feels comfortable with in a mutual fund, his serotonin and dopamine levels go up. In older times, the reward would have been finding food or surviving an attack from a predator, both conducive to survival and a better life, but the modern equivalents are product and service stimuli in the environment, obtaining which improves the situation of the organism. And the brain is configured to want these dollops of neurotransmitters. Brands are a means of delivering these dollops of neurotransmitters to the brain. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-22, safety-related brands and even other brands that can increase serotonin in the brain will get greater traction as more people’s brains want to feel safe up to a point.
The brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the body. It is 2 per cent of the body weight but has 20-25 per cent of the body’s energy consumption. So it tries to conserve energy by pushing things into the unconscious, by making things automatic. Automatic processing in the brain is more energy-efficient. Brands are shortcuts to making choice decisions and are energy savers; without brands, customer brains would face a perpetual overload.
The brain also forgets in order to conserve energy. Our brains contain not only learning mechanisms but also forgetting mechanisms that erase ‘unnecessary’ learning. Brains do this to reduce work and to reduce the energy expenditure on the conscious brain.
But what determines what enters our unconscious store and what gets erased? This answer constitutes the fundamental difference between success and failure for a brand. A powerful brand, therefore, is one that has been ‘learnt’ well, and not only that, the brand has also entered the unconscious of the target customer and is entrenched there. By being entrenched in the unconscious, it becomes an automatic choice for the consumer and reduces the brain’s energy consumption. The extra effort required to process a new brand is, therefore, not needed. Paradoxically, even if the brand resides in the unconscious, it needs to be used or consumed or remembered in some way periodically; otherwise, without a strong emotional imprint, the brand will be erased from the memory. The brain is like a muscle. Without use, it atrophies. Or, to be precise, without the exercise of remembering, thinking, buying, talking about and using a brand, it gets erased from the brain—especially if it does not carry a strong emotional imprint.
Cognitive Biases are short and simplified methods of making decisions and finding solutions; they reduce the energy consumption of the brain. For example, the distinct smell of a certain food product, or an idea or slogan such as Subway’s ‘Eat Fresh’, are different ways that can be used to benefit a product. That brands are present in the unconscious is demonstrated by studies that find that even as customers claim that their reason for buying a brand is completely rational, the unconscious emotion centres of the brain are activated when they talk about and choose the brand. Thus, a clear understanding of how a brand can get into the unconscious and reside there will help a firm improve its brand management capabilities and outcomes.
The brain also conserves energy by using habit formation, the Habits form through incremental experience over time and do not shift readily with changes in people’s goals and plans. Habit knowledge is protected from short-term whims and occasional happenings. When confronted with options, habits are likely to be favoured due to the ease with which they can be performed when compared with the alternatives. Thus, the brain prefers exercising familiar choices over new ones because of the difficulty of learning new usage behaviours. Habits also are likely to be favoured positively due to the fluency or speed and ease of processing that comes with frequently performed behaviours. High fluency is experienced as positive, partly because it evokes familiarity over uncertainty and makes people better at processing and understanding. Habits thus exploit a physiological aspect that favours what feels easy because it is well-practised, over what feels more difficult because it is new. Change increases risk perceptions in the anterior insula and changes serotonin levels from where they should be. The brand that has become a habit has, therefore, attained brand nirvana.
Additionally, repeated behaviours, such as a customer’s buying of the same brand, heighten feelings of comfort, confidence and control, although these choices might initially be random. Furthermore, actions performed out of habit promote coherence or comprehensibility of experiences and thus enhance meaning in life. The switching costs one incurs can discourage deviating from habits, and the subsequently experienced fluency can further contribute to an increase in the liking for products and brands that are habitual. Indeed, one could argue that the goal of branding should be to make one’s brand habitual!
Source : Brands and the Brain: How to Use Neuroscience to Create Impactful Brands by Arvind Sahay
Good Reads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60693959-brands-and-the-brain
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