Table Of ContentUNCONSCIOUS
BRANDING
UNCONSCIOUS
BRANDING
HOW NEUROSCIENCE CAN EMPOWER (AND
INSPIRE) MARKETING
DOUGLAS VAN PRAET
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To my parents,
Marie-Louise and Robert
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I
THE SCIENCE BELOW OUR DEEPER BEHAVIOR
1 The Myth of Marketing
2 Humans, Not Consumers
3 The Biology of Behavior
PART II
THE SEVEN STEPS TO BEHAVIOR CHANGE
4 Step One: Interrupt the Pattern
5 Step Two: Create Comfort
6 Step Three: Lead the Imagination
7 Step Four: Shift the Feeling
8 Step Five: Satisfy the Critical Mind
9 Step Six: Change the Associations
10 Step Seven: Take Action
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
When Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times.
Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it’s
going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture.
—David Brooks, TED, March 2011
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, IN SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA, I stood at
the front of a large hotel conference room filled with marketing executives and
advertising professionals and told them that consumers were not in control of
their brand choices. The audience looked at me as though I had two heads. But
what was mind-boggling to marketers was a no-brainer to any cognitive
scientist, because to a certain extent, my colleagues were right: We do all have
two heads.
Though Freud popularized the psychological distinction between the
conscious and unconscious minds nearly a century ago, only in recent decades
has science begun to unravel the biological mysteries of the human brain.
Humans operate from two separate and often contentious cognitive systems and
the mind that drives most of our behavior is ironically the one unbeknownst to
our selves. A deluge of research in recent years about the emotional, irrational,
and unconscious dimensions of decision making has vindicated my controversial
stance: consumers, i.e., humans, make most of their decisions in life quite
unconsciously. We are just beginning to understand how this research applies to
the choices we make in everyday life, but what science is finding will
fundamentally change both how we sell and how we buy.
For too long, marketers have been asking the wrong question. If consumers
are making their decisions unconsciously, why do we persist in asking them
directly through market research why they do what they do? It’s like asking the
political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich. It’s not that consumers are
intentionally trying to deceive or are even reluctant to share their opinions. They
simply can’t tell us because they don’t really know.
Before marketers develop strategies, they need to first recognize that
consumers have strategies too . . . human strategies, not consumer strategies.
These ways of thinking lead to a set of neurological and behavioral steps with a
process, sequence, and structure rooted in our biology and evolution, not just in
our culture and marketplace. And they are steps that can be uncovered and
harnessed at will to guide and inform marketing and advertising strategy. As
marketers, we need to go beyond asking why and begin to ask how. We need to
shift from just measuring the outward expressions of beliefs and attitudes to
better understanding the inward processes and real behavioral causes behind
them. That is, how do the minds of people process information, structure their
experience, and form the often-unconscious beliefs and motivations that drive
their behavior?
When my mother goes to the supermarket and pulls one of the last boxes of
Tide powder from the shelf, she is demonstrating what cognitive scientists have
long theorized: that the moment she stands in the detergent aisle and reaches out
for that box, her brain is processing decades of memories, nostalgia, the scent of
her children’s clothes, and the day she did her husband’s laundry in their first
new home. She doesn’t buy the same brand just because it works or because it’s
cheaper; she buys it because it triggers a deep and neurologically seated process
of behavior.
Unfortunately, businesses have long based their marketplace knowledge on
culture and economics and not on the truths of biology and brain evolution. They
have borrowed heavily from the social sciences while virtually ignoring the
natural sciences, leaving so much fertile ground with woefully few farmers. This
new shift from a cultural to a biological view of behavior is one of the most
exciting and promising opportunities in the history of humanity. In fact, as this
book will demonstrate a majority of the most outward, pervasive, and
economically significant manifestations of our culture—such as our media, the
television shows we watch, the movies we love, the advertising that moves us,
and the products and services we buy every day—have clearly explainable
neurobiological determinants.
Throughout my career in marketing and advertising, I have worked on every
side of the market research and strategic planning industries, most recently at
Deutsch LA, the award-winning, nationally leading advertising agency. Our
clients include premiere industry marketers such as Volkswagen, Target, Sony
PlayStation, HTC, Dr Pepper, and Snapple. What I have seen is that those
advertisers and campaigns willing to take risks, to make creative leaps beyond
the instruction of market research, and to act with instinct and intuition have
proven the most fruitful. While these marketers discovered that we couldn’t rely
on the research alone, they also couldn’t articulate the process of their gut
feelings and their imaginative insights.
In addition to being a marketing practitioner, I supplemented my
understanding by becoming a behavior change therapist working with clients of
a different sort. In the age of technology, marketers are at risk of becoming out
of touch with the real-life, flesh-and-blood needs and challenges of people—not
consumers. I learned how to help everyday people like you and me who were
interested in changing their lives and their behavior . . . not because of emotional
illness but because of a desire for self-improvement and a more fulfilling life—
the same things people seek in brands. And through that work, I noticed
firsthand how the unconscious was the key to that change.
I became fascinated by the deeper worlds inside people. I became intrigued by
how, unlike marketers, therapists always sought the hidden meaning, never
hanging on the words of their customers as gospel truth. I learned to discern the
subtleties of nonverbal communication, body language, and unconscious micro-
expressions of emotions. Having studied at a college and clinic of behavioral
science specializing in understanding unconscious motivation, I became certified
as a hypnotherapist. I gained access and profound insight into behavioral-change
techniques that often entail a fraction of the time and effort of other traditional
psychological methods. Many of these esoteric, intuitive, revolutionary
techniques were corroborated and deepened through my investigations of the
neurosciences, including cognitive science, neurobiology, evolutionary
psychology, and behavioral economics. So I began reverse engineering what I
learned from all these disciplines, starting with the things that were proven to
yield real results quickly in real people. I created a seven-step process to change
behavior, one that I have been applying to marketing and advertising strategies
with remarkable success ever since.
Much of what I have to say may seem like an indictment on the state of
marketing today. This is not a judgment. It’s a firsthand observation. Having
worked many years helping marketers plan strategies and conduct research, I
became acutely aware of the shortcomings of my own efforts and the tools of my
trade. Far too many marketers have ignored the elephant in the room—the role
of unconscious decision making—despite the continually amassing evidence of
its importance. Far fewer have adopted any pragmatic means to integrate this
learning into business operations. My frustration and curiosity for the truth led
me to search for better answers. I found them not in market research but rather in
the research of cognitive and behavioral authorities.
Most of the ideas in this book are not my own ideas. They originated in the
minds of some of the world’s most brilliant behavioral scientists. My
contribution is to build a practical bridge to, and explain the manifestations of,
their observations in our cultures, markets, and economies. Most marketers are
still unaware of these scientists’ insights, which is why I find it so important to
espouse their truths to the marketing and advertising world. The lessons they
teach have revolutionary implications on how we do business at a time when
economic improvement and better business models are so desperately needed.
