Why Every Marketer Needs to Learn the Neuroscience of Branding

Photo by Oleg Laptev, Unsplash

What if I were to tell you that you and everyone else you know is blind AND are entirely unaware of the blindness? The reason why you've never noticed is the topic of this post - Perception. Read on to learn about perception, how it connects to the neuroscience of branding and, ultimately, what it all means for consumer behavior. 

So, how are we blind? Well, if you take a look at the anatomy of the eye, there is one area where our eyes never pick up any visual information. The area is where the optic nerve meets the retina. Think of the eye like a camera lens. The spot where the lens connects to the camera body is a blind spot in the eyesight of the lens - the same principle with the optic nerve and the retina. This blindspot exists in all humans, roughly 15 degrees from the center of your vision.

Despite this biological fact, we never notice we are blind—the primary reason is perception. The brain is actively making up what it gathers should be in the blind spot and fills it in with visual information. In other words, the brain creates the perception of what you are seeing. It does this through what is called mental models. 

Our brains are pattern-seeking machines. These patterns make up mental models. It extends further than our vision. For instance, many of our perceptions of wine are based on mental models. Wine with a higher price tag tastes better. Wine served in a Riedel glass tastes better than wine served in a plastic cup. And this is not cheap trickery either. When the same experiments are run while looking into the test subjects' brains via fMRI, researchers could see the taste literally hits a different part of the brain. In other words, if you believe you are drinking a $300 bottle of wine out of a Riedel glass, you will see much higher activation in the pleasure center of the brain vs if you were served the same bottle in a plastic cup with a $10 price tag.

It isn't just sensory input that feeds into our mental models; beliefs do too. In fact, beliefs can have an equal amount of, sometimes more, influence on our mental models and our perception by extension. 

The key takeaway here is our malleable perception is based on mental models, and beliefs can influence our mental models. This relationship ultimately drives our perception, which brings me to the question of brands. What is a brand, really? Marketing definition aside, if you think about it neuroscientifically, a brand is a mental model. And the belief surrounding the brand affects the consumers' enjoyment, attention, engagement and much, much more.

Let's look at the example of Ray-Ban. In a research done at Duke University, subjects were told they are wearing Ray-Ban branded glasses vs unbranded glass reported Ray-Bans to block the sun much better. Beyond perception, beliefs and mental models tied to brands can have a physical impact. In a 2016 study, subjects were given golf clubs to try. One group got Nike branded clubs, and the other got unbranded clubs. The Nike group actually hit the ball further than the unbranded group.

What this tells us is there is a gap between objectivity and subjectivity. This neuroscientific gap is a brand marketer's playground. If humans experienced the world objectively, marketing would be a different discipline altogether. Since it is nearly impossible to experience the objective world because we share our mental model of it. Marketers can influence the mental models by creating brands that inform our beliefs which directly affect our mental models.

P.S. - Brands are mental models, yes, but are the first step in creating a neuroscience-based branding strategy. If you'd like to learn how to apply neuroscience to marketing at a more tactical level, take a look at Pop Neuro's Neuromarketing Certification.

Written by Prince Ghuman

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