Those Darned Emotions

People often weigh buying decisions on how they anticipate they will feel about the purchase after they’ve done it.

A recent study by researchers at University College London found that people almost always misinterpret how they are going to feel and consequently go on to make poor decisions.

The job of brand is to see to it that customers anticipate positive emotional experiences and are rewarded by having positive emotional experiences after they have bought.

Harry Chittenden

Chunks and Instinct

I recently saved a couple of articles on current thinking in psychology. While neither is on branding, they both demonstrate first how brands are constructed in the mind and secondly how the mind uses brands to make decisions.

Scientific American published an extensive article by Phillip E. Ross called “The Expert Mind.” The theme of the article is that experts, like chess masters, are mostly made, not born. They gain their expertise through “effortful” study. In other words they are highly motivated to learn a highly complex subject.

Ross surmises that the mind learns in “chunks.” Chunks are big identifiable collections of information that the mind can calculate in a single stroke rather than deal with each individual piece of information separately. He cites this example:

Take the sentence “Mary had a little lamb.” The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one’s knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.

Isn’t one of our goals in branding to do what we can to organize for the customer the information about the brand into a usable, attractive chunk. Couldn’t you characterize “favorable impression in the customer’s mind” as a happy chunk?

When the customer is ready to make a decision about the brand, he takes the chunk from his memory and brings it to his conscience mind for analysis. Right? Well, probably not. Johnjoe McFadden in Guardian says that the conscience mind rarely gets involved with complicated decisions.

He tells of an experiment in which an experimenter named Libet asked subjects

…to perform a simple task, eg wiggle their little finger, at a time of their own choosing, and measured accompanying brain activity. Surprisingly, Libet could detect brain activity that predicted imminent finger wiggling nearly half a second before the subjects were aware they had decided to wiggle their finger!

We think that we make decisions when in fact the decision has already been made by our subconscious! The mind, faced with a decision, withdraws the chunks it needs, makes the decision and then shares it with the conscience mind.

Moreover, each time a customer has an encounter with the brand the chunk is modified to accommodate for the new experience.

Branding lesson: know what the brand’s chunk is and then work hard to make coherent, attractive contributions to your customer’s chunk, both in marketing and more important in serving his or her needs.

How does that make you feel?

Science tells us that within the first seven seconds of meeting someone, we form our first impression. To do this we combine a staggering array of information. Sensory input rushes forth. How does he smell? What context does that smell belong in? How does he look? What is the condition of his hair, his skin, his eyes? What is he wearing? What is the sound and tone of his voice? What is that accent? What is the nature of his handshake?

Add to all that what you may or may not have heard about his person before and you have gigabytes of information inputted and processed in a couple of blinks of the eye.

But that’s just the beginning. You process all of this sensory input and reach a conclusion, but not a hard edged factual one. Just about every conclusion that you reach about this guy is emotional. All of that input will combine to give you a feeling. Warmth? Fear? Suspicion? Disdain? Attraction?

Furthermore, all of these feelings adjust instantly with each new encounter with the person, whether it is a direct meeting or hearsay.

With the passage of time the more coherent and integrated and attractive the perceptions of this man become, the more favorably you will think of him.

It’s the same with a brand encounter. The more coherent and integrated and attractive the brand, the more favorable place it will hold in your mind.

As marketers our job is to see that the outward sensations of the brand, its appearance, its messages, its voice are coherent and integrated and attractive. We work to insure that these sensations produce positive emotions.

Of course that’s just part of the brand. The other part, the main part, is how the company or organization treats its customers.

Posted by Harry Chittenden