The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (25 page)

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The Consumer Journey

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there may be a set of rituals and/or a set of steps that must be taken in order to fully enjoy the product.

So
enjoyment of the product
requires the product provider to facilitate all aspects of these processes of usage, consumption, and enjoyment. As an example, if we look at how one enjoys wine, we can see the considerable effort winemakers have invested in teaching the general public how to successfully navigate a fairly subtle product enjoyment process. We can also see the important role of rituals and a sequence of sensory tasks that go into optimal enjoyment of the product.

Most modular furniture makers have difficulty in creating product enjoyment postpurchase, as the monumental task of taking the furniture home and assembling it can be frustrating and distressing for most consumers. It is equally distressing that many times the product is unavailable for enjoyment immediately after purchase, and must either be shipped or delivered to the consumer.

Many computer makers have similar difficulty because the act of enjoying the product involves a level of assembly and connectivity that the consumer finds either frustrating or too hard to do. These are areas where
Enjoyment
innovation could lead to big benefits.

Ease of product enjoyment creates consumer loyalty to the product and to the underlying brand. Effective advertising needs to stimulate not only the purchase of the product, but also provide cues as to how it can be enjoyed once the product is acquired. We have observed in our research that strategically targeted and imaginatively executed advertising can facilitate a desire for immediate consumption and immediate enjoyment in the mind of the consumer.

Advocacy:
This is the most “engaged” step in the Consumer Journey. It is also, not surprisingly,
the holy grail
of all product and marketing efforts.

How can you get the consumer to talk about and actively advocate the product to friends, family, and peers? How can the consumer be brought to social networks, blogs, and other community groups to create extraordinary advocacy?

Advocacy can trigger additional advocacy exponentially, and the viral power of such advocacy can create a tidal wave of consumer purchase intent. We have found that there are components of product design, interactive experience design, and advertising that create viral goodwill and a foundation for advocacy.

Unleashing the raw power of social networks and associated advocacy in our connected society is critical to modern day marketing.

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and Brands

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r How brands can be measured precisely, accurately, and reliably across all of the seven critical dimensions of the Brand Essence Framework r How that Framework can be applied to strengthen existing brands, significantly improve the success of brand extensions, and similarly enhance marketplace prospects for new brands

r How neurological testing provides previously unobtainable insights into and recommendations for core/critical brand elements including positioning and sponsorships

The Problem: Unknowable Feelings

At a recent marketing strategy meeting, one of our clients was reviewing his team’s proposal for imagery for a brand relaunch. Spread out in front of him were four large mood boards with photos, images, logo concepts, and symbols. He is his company’s Chief Marketing Officer, so a lot of people were in the room, anxiously awaiting his reaction. He viewed the mood boards for only a minute or two.

Then his fist pounded down on the table, punctuating his demand for answers.

“What does this have to do with my brand? How do you know this stuff has any relevance in the consumer’s mind?” Each pound was accompanied by the scuffling of tabletop pens and phones—he was (
continued
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The Buying Brain

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pounding that hard. The problem was no one had a really compelling answer to his questions.

For decades, brand managers and creative agencies have relied on a combination of their gut and consumer research to make multimillion dollar decisions about brand and marketing communications strategy.

Sometimes the gut instinct is good, sometimes not. The research, however, has been asked to do something it simply cannot: provide precise, clear information about how a consumer genuinely
feels
about your brand on a deep, subconscious level. This is what our client was struggling with.

The Complications

When our client was pounding his fist on the table, he was expressing his frustration that there were not clear and compelling indications of his brand’s key attributes in each and every image and symbol he saw. Even more frustrating was that there was not complete agreement on what those brand attributes were in the mind of the consumer. There was some general agreement as to what his brand’s key attributes were, and there were some disputed attributes.

Plus, some hunches that there were
undiscovered
attributes
that could expand their brand’s reach into new markets. But, the traditional research had not brought clarity to this issue (again, because it could not access and measure at the deep subconscious level of the consumer’s mind, where these brand attributes are formed and reside).

Your brand is the heart and soul of your business. Humans have a hardwired need to have relationships not only with other humans, but also with the functional and fun items and tools we use in our daily lives. The challenge is to present your brand as something your consumer can have and wants to have a long-term relationship with.
We love novelty and change,
but we also have a strong need for constancy and commitment. The brain has well-developed neural programs for connecting with the meaningful items in our lives. Learning and measuring the effects of these can provide guidelines for how you design, present, and communicate your brands to the people you want to reach.

From universal brands like Coca-Cola, to individual micro brands like your neighborhood coffee shop, the brands in our lives serve a vital human purpose: they give identity, meaning, and connectivity to our experiences P1: OTA/XYZ

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The Buying Brain and Brands

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and possessions. Humans have a basic need to organize our lives into the recognizable and the familiar. Learning about new things daily and constantly would quickly exhaust the mind. Yet the familiar can become the mundane.

The recognizable can become the invisible. At what point does the brain thirst for a novel experience? To understand how and when this can happen, you must understand the foundational dimensions of your brand.

Foundational Brand Questions

r What is the deep, subconscious meaning of my brand in the consumer’s mind?

r What is my true brand equity?

r How do I migrate agnostics to brand devotees?

r How do I track brand equity? How often should I track them?

The Brand Essence Framework—A

Foundation for Neurobranding

There are many treatises written on brands: their archetypes, architecture, planning, strategy, and their activation. We have studied brands at the deep subconscious level across numerous categories, including automotive, financial services, fashion, health and beauty, Internet, consumer electronics, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, alcohol and spirits, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, and many more. In each case, we studied what the brand managers believed the essence of the brand was and what the consumer’s deep subconscious response to the brand was using the Deep Subconscious Response described earlier. Our observations of brands across categories have led us to decipher and reconstruct an explicit framework that operates both subconsciously and consciously in the human mind. We found a very consistent pattern that we have codified as the Brand Essence Framework.

We posit this Framework as the
core and foundation of neurobranding.

The Framework is easy to articulate and intuitive to understand. But at its core, it is the blueprint for gaining a deep and full understanding of how the brain creates brands at the subconscious level of the mind, and how to leverage that knowledge to strengthen existing brands, improve the performance of brand extensions, and create the most successful new brands.

The purpose of applying the Brand Essence Framework is to provide a very concrete way to build
brand passion
—a breathlessly romantic, yet thoughtfully loving relationship with the brand. Isn’t it interesting that this complex relationship with the brand also mirrors our expectations in our lives P1: OTA/XYZ

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The Buying Brain

with our significant others? In a way, this is a happy trade-off between the comforts and security of familiarity with a dash of novelty and newness to bring excitement into everyday life.

Of all the insights that neuroscience can bring to the business world,
this
is perhaps the most powerful:
the ability to understand how a consumer truly connects various concepts about the brand at a deep subconscious level.

Importantly, the Brand Essence Framework can also be used to determine the effectiveness of both sponsored events and spokespeople. Both of these high-visibility corporate initiatives greatly influence how a Brand is received in the consumer’s mind. For this reason, it’s critically important to carefully match sponsored events and spokespeople with the objectives identified by the Brand Essence Framework. Using the Framework in the early stages of these campaigns ensures that the event or spokesperson reinforces the perception of the Brand in the marketplace.

When working to define a conceptual framework, it is wise to follow the brain’s way of organizing the chaotic world we live in, from the specific/physical to the general/metaphorical. This seems to be the path the brain takes as it struggles to make sense of the world. It starts with the basic form of an object. Then it proceeds to larger and more abstract concepts. This is also how the brain comes to know your brand.

The Brand Essence Framework has
seven dimensions
. We define each dimension, provide examples of it, and explain its importance. Note that each dimension can be measured using a different combination of the NeuroMetric techniques outlined earlier, especially the Deep Subconscious Response methodology described in the last chapter.

Form:
This is the physical manifestation of the brand. The
most tangible
sensory and physical connection the consumer has with the brand. In our testing, form attributes are deeply, but implicitly, recognized by consumers in their deep subconscious as being connected with the brand. We are biologically programmed to seek out and classify form. Yet, we may not be consciously aware that we are doing this. Many times we find that the formal elements consumers connect, recognize, and embrace in the brand are not easily described verbally, but can play a vital role in how the product is received, as we shall discuss later.

The formal elements of a brand that are more or less strongly connected in the subconscious might include logos, imagery, iconography, designs, and fonts associated with the brand. Connection could also be physical features of the product that include tangible elements, such as shape, size, capacity, color, or texture. Form includes not only visual elements, but also audio elements, such as tone, timbre, melody, beat, and harmonic qualities.

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Think of the Form as the
face and voice of the brand.
In addition to the form attributes associated with the brand per se, it is also important to understand the form attributes of the
category
that seep into and become attributes of the
brand.
There is often a strong connection—brand and category—at the subconscious level. Therefore, it is important to ask three key questions:
1.
What are the attributes of form that the consumer’s subconscious mind connects to my
category
?

2.
What are the attributes of form that the consumer’s subconscious mind connects to my
brand
?

3.
What are the attributes of form that the consumer’s subconscious mind connects to my
competitors
?

The unique style lines and contours of the product personify the form attributes of some brands. A classic example is Porsche, which is personified by the unique styling of the front and the rear of the car. Gull-winged car doors scream Lamborghini, while the elongated hood, side coves, and quartet of round rear lights mark the distinctive styling of a Corvette.

How long does it take one to recognize the unique shape of the bottle as belonging to brand Coke?

It is intriguing that the style of font can also serve to establish and represent iconic brands. While we can argue whether it is the color of the beverage, the condensation on the glass, or the bubbles at the very top that most quintessentially and best represent Coca-Cola, it is undeniable that the Spenserian Script of “Coca-Cola” does an instant and admirable job of representing Brand Coke. The choice of color and font (black and Spenserian Script) in the case of Coke Zero serves to represent it very well as a brand extension.