One Neuroscientific Concept Every Brand Marketer Should Know

When was the last time you saw a fast-food company’s logo with the color blue in it? Chances are, rarely. All fast food logos use either red or yellow or both but almost none use blue. 

This is because of something called statistical learning, a neuroscientific concept which brand marketers should know. The goal of this article is to explain the concept, show how it nudges behavior, and how it re-shapes your brand marketing.

What is Statistical Learning?

It is the brain’s natural tendency to pick up on the regularities in your environment. 

Your brain is a relentless pattern-seeking machine.  And these patterns affect consumer behavior in fascinating ways for marketers to note.

For example, take this brilliant experiment by researchers at the University of Hyogo in Japan. Participants were served the exact same soup in three different color variations - blue, yellow, and red - using tasteless and odorless dyes. Researchers found the color blue resulted in reduced consumption of food. Moreover, subjects were also less satisfied and less likely to eat again if the soup was blue. 

But why? Why would the color blue serve as an appetite suppressant? Maybe because you rarely find blue food in nature. So when the brain picks up on the pattern that most food isn’t blue, and stumbles across blue food, a subconscious hesitation occurs.

Brand Marketing Applications

Brands are built on statistical learning; they’re the net effect of the connections the consumer’s brain has made. For instance, think about how your brain connects Gatorade to sports performance. Corona beer with the beach. Or Coca-Cola with happiness. Or Red Bull with extreme activities. 

This level of branding is built on repetitive and consistent messaging that translates to relationships in the consumer’s mind. Reframe branding as an exercise in statistical learning. Instead of only building upon a chosen brand personality, think about implicit regularities you want to construct, that ultimately lead to brand impression.

One of the brightest examples of this is the sustainable shoe company, All Birds. Everything from their product construction to packaging, from their e-commerce to physical retail experience, are implicit regularities that create a much deeper impression of the brand’s ethos. 

Web copy, ads, images, video, and audio content all should reinforce these implicit regularities which will ultimately create a deeper connection between the brand and the brain of the consumer.

Statistical learning is not only about observations but the unconscious motivations of your consumers. So think about your product and services. What patterns might be forming in your consumer’s mind and what do those observations persuade them to do? 

Statistical learning is powerful. When you approach branding with this perspective, you’re starting to think like a neuro-marketer.

Written by Prince Ghuman

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