Distinctiveness is more powerful than uniqueness, fantasy triumphs over reality, and distinctive brand assets, bolstered by supercharged cues, build memory structure faster than you can say, Daniel Kahneman. Question traditional theories such as the product life cycle, segmentation, and the funnel because they go against the way the brain really works. Your data is wrong. What you see is not what you get.
The fallacy of persuasion
The premise of “The Power of Instinct” is that people don’t buy because of need or loyalty; they buy on instinct. We cannot convince anyone of anything, no matter how we try. People’s choices are not based on conscious thought. Most marketing is focused on the conscious mind; it should be on the unconscious mind. I wrote about it here about the arms race between mindfulness and sales manipulation.
Status quo
I love books that tackle the status quo. It is a bit like “The old rules in marketing are dead”, but also “The seven laws of guaranteed growth” , “The context marketing revolution”, “X: the experience when business meets design” and “Killing marketing” . “Killing marketing” is one of my favourites.
95%
The conscious mind only accounts for roughly 5% of our decisions. Our unconscious mind makes a staggering 95% of our choices, which means that the traditional conscious-model approach to marketing is dead.
Brand connectome
It would help if you focused on creating a positive brand connectome, the cumulative associations and memories, both positive and negative, that form a physical network of neural pathways. The command centre for instinctive choices resides in the unconscious mind. The more neural connections a brand takes up in the brain, the more power it has. As the brand connectome grows, so will your business, cause, or idea, ensuring success over the long term and a foolproof approach to getting people to buy, vote for, and do what you want.
Not
It is not about coupons, discounts, NPS, market research and focus groups (people lie), attributes, coding people’s facial expressions, satisfaction surveys, uniqueness (oh, oh), focus on existing customers,
Instead
Instead, focus on validation, positive sticky associations and memories, anthropology, positive bias, salience, perception, familiarity, sight, taste, smell, distinctiveness, fantasy, customer acquisition, metaphors, humour and building the neural pathways.
Connect with what already exists
And connect continuously. The human mind constantly makes analogies between trillions of associations, memories, images, sounds, and more, rapidly coming to intuitive conclusions. When you leverage a positive bias, you take the path of least resistance. That’s because you are piggybacking your idea, opinion, or product onto associations the person you’re trying to influence already has. This approach is so much easier than starting from scratch.
A brand is the sum of all the connections
For me, a brand is the sum of all experiences. For the author, a brand is everything that it is connected to. It’s not just the product or logo. It’s all the connections the brain has created about the brand—it could be the people who work at the company, the consumers who use the brand, and a myriad of images, ideas, and memories the brand brings to mind. Simply put, a brand is known by the associations it keeps.
Physical footprint in the brain
When your brand has this abundance of positive associations, you create a larger physical footprint in the brain, leading to instinctive brand preference. Brain real estate. Owning a well-managed, large, positive physical presence in the mind. Physical mindshare.
Piggybacking culture
Ask consumers what images of cheese they find most appealing—which ones they like best—and they will point to the stretchy topping on a piece of pizza, but ask the same consumers what superior cheese looks like. The images stored in their minds are completely different. Consumers don’t need advertising to tell them what these images mean, or that a particular brand of cheese is more wholesome, natural, and authentic. Culture has already done that work. Brands should tap into implicit associations already written into our neural pathways. That is the path of least resistance—piggybacking on what is already in the mind. Importantly, the emotional connection we feel with a brand or product is an outcome of all these positive associations, not an input.
Eco systems
Brands that do this best survive the test of time by creating giant ecosystems that touch multiple aspects of people’s lives. Creating instinctive brand preference is automatic, repetitive purchase behaviour.
Brain branching
The more touch points, the better. Imagine the brand connectome as a tree with many branches. To gain true mind share and get people to make the decision you want, you must grow your connectome in their brains, sprouting and tending new branches and roots, growing those neural pathways. Brain branching, if you will. It all starts with that first seed and being deliberate about defining the connectome and constantly adding new memories and associations, evolving and growing the brand.
The rules
- You don’t control your choices. Your brand connectome does.
- Overwhelm the negatives with positives.
- Band preference is actually a bias.
- Uniqueness is overrated. That’s why nine out of ten brands fail: They try to attract customers through something too cutting edge, something customers have never seen before.
- Instead of standing out, your messaging needs to create a cognitive shortcut between the brand and the audience’s brain.
- When our brain recognizes something familiar in a new context, it is drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Since familiarity breeds comfort in our brain, the more recognizable a product, streaming show, or idea, the more likely people are to choose it over another.
- There is no advantage to a singular focus. Distilling your communications down to one brand dimension is a recipe for shrinking your brand and its connectome. A connectome with only one message takes up a few neural pathways.
- Multiple messages, similar to multidimensional cues, target multiple parts of the brain. The higher the “brain utilization,” or the more parts of the brain that connect with the messaging, the more engaged the brain will become.
- In the marketplace, every category has a dominant fantasy. For the outdoors, it’s adventure, excitement, reflection, and connection with nature. In skin care, it’s that perfect skin, the outward signal of inner health and happiness. In home goods and furniture, it’s the stylish, comfortable home of your dreams. In sports drinks, it’s unmatched performance.
- Contrast is like steroids for the brain.
- True loyalty can’t be bought. It can only come from having an enormous physical brand connectome, overfilled with positive associations.
- The most powerful ideas are universal.
- Forget about segmentation. The question you need to ask is not “How are our customers different?” but “How are our customers alike?”
- The largest dominant competitor has the most customers for you to gain.
- When you start to lose authenticity, something consumers can sniff out a mile away.
The universality of associations
You want to own the growth triggers. Growth triggers are supercharged images, words, sounds, smells, and even textures that trigger the memories, impressions, and good feelings that already exist in our minds. Like a Trojan horse, they can sneak new ideas into our minds undetected because they rely on something familiar. Once inside our heads, they explode with positive associations and meaning, latching on to different parts of the brain and expanding their reach across its terrain.
Mental heuristics
The most effective cognitive shortcuts are typically the simplest. In effect, growth triggers need no explanation. That’s why they’re so efficient from an advertising and communication standpoint. What you have to do is recognize these mental heuristics when you encounter them and then incorporate them into all the marketing touch points you have. They are embedded in specific categories, and once you understand what you’re looking for, you will start seeing them everywhere. Robin Hood, ketchup,
Distinctive brand assets
To build salience today, you need a whole portfolio of distinctive brand assets, used repeatedly across and within consumer touchpoints, to tell your brand story and build a healthy, large brand connectome. These DBAs include:
- Brand World. This is where the brand exists, a world that stays consistent no matter what channel you’re using.
- Expertise. Here, you would present a graphic or visual that quickly communicates a product or company’s approach to create superior results.
- Consumer Benefit. These are visual assets that convey how the user will be impacted or will benefit from using your product or service.
- Symbols. Symbols are the most succinct and simplified shorthand cue packed with positive associations.
GPS for the brain
DBAs are so strong that even if you show a portion of one, the consumer’s brain fills in the rest of the blanks. Think of the brain as having its own GPS. When a company removes a distinctive brand asset, it is as if they are removing the guideposts consumers’ brains use to find their product and judge its quality. Every time you change your DBAs, you decrease your connectome, making it harder for your consumers to connect the dots as they lose positive associations.
Multiple touch points and immersion lead to relevance
Relevance only occurs when your brand is connected to multiple everyday touchpoints in people’s minds. Reminds me of “Talk triggers”. Creating a well-balanced brand connectome requires being thoughtful in creating diversified drivers that, when taken together, tell a cohesive story and create perceived superiority. Multiple drivers yield higher conversion because the more we understand about a brand, the more our brains connect with it. For example, if you know the founder’s story about a brand or the so-called backstory, you will be more loyal to it than if you don’t. Unfortunately, companies often try to ignore their past and heritage because they believe it’s old-fashioned or will make the brand appear dated. But it’s not enough to stop at history. Come up with just one big idea about your brand, and it will remain hidden in the mind. It is a lone road, off the beaten track, isolated from the connections to important associations and memories in your brain. Layering multiple messages on top of that one provides a robust ecosystem of positive associations for your brain to get lost. The point is to immerse your audience’s brains in your brand’s story. By connecting with people on multiple levels, you essentially meet them where they are, lighting up their brains with your connectome.
Unified, clear messaging
Without a unified, clear message entering consumers’ memory structure, people create their own story about your brand, leading to misperceptions. To do so, they need more than a brand book—they have to develop a tighter set of guidelines for determining which messages, By creating a portfolio of pre-approved messages, growth triggers, associations, and DBAs, you will have your whole brand at your fingertips and will be less likely to deviate.
Tend the tree
Instead of bombarding, arguing, or incentivizing, you can move away from conscious persuasion and focus on how people actually make choices. That’s why you need to remain a brand arborist, tending to your tree, watering its roots, giving it the necessary nutrients, and making sure any dead leaves or branches are quickly removed. If you’re blaming these for poor performance or a declining customer base, you’re spending too much time looking outward and not enough looking inward.
Hmmm
The book brings an interesting perspective, and it might work for low-involvement products. With high-involvement products, I am not so sure. My issue with the book is that AI assistants will soon be doing most of the buying for us, and an AI will have no brand connectome, brand preference, or brand loyalty and will have full access to all the information it needs. You will have to program the AI with preference, and because it is subconscious, it is not explicit and difficult to express and instruct. In that context, reviews, for example, become one of the elements of the brand you need to tend to very carefully. AI will only buy from companies with five-star reviews.
