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.