Brand Seduction: How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands

By Daryl Weber

"Powerful, profound, and beautifully written, Brand Seduction raises the bar for every marketer to do work that truly matters." —Seth Godin, author of All Marketers Are Liars   "Clever, creative, and jam-packed with useful insights, Brand Seduction shows how our brain secretly shapes our choices in ways we may never have realized." —Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of Contagious and Invisible Influence For many marketing professionals, "science" is a four-letter word. They see brand-building as an unteachable art guided by their intuition and experience. But at its core, marketing aims to seed ideas into people's minds, make them feel a certain way, and, ultimately, get them to act. In Brand Seduction, Daryl reveals the latest psychological and neuroscientific discoveries about how our minds process brand information and make decisions, and the important roles our emotions and unconscious play in our selections. Welcome to the new world of neuromarketing. Through simple language, engaging stories, and real-world examples, Brand Seduction shows you how to decode, build, and use these hidden brand fantasies to grow your brand and business. You'll learn: • The surprising unconscious side of brands. • The biggest myths about consumer psychology. • The real role of emotions in building brands. • Practical tools to use neuroscience to inspire better marketing. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what brands are, how they work, and how they are built. Brand Seduction digs deeper into the nature of brands, how they exist and behave in the mind, and how marketers and business leaders can use this understanding to "seduce" customers and grow their businesses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632659859

Daryl Weber

Daryl Weber is a seasoned branding consultant whose work has influenced many of the best and biggest brands in the world, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Johnnie Walker, Gatorade, Pampers, and many more. He was formerly Global Director of Creative Strategy at The Coca-Cola Company, where he oversaw brand and communication strategy for many of the company's billion-dollar brands. Prior to that, he was Director of Strategy at the boutique brand and innovation consultancy Redscout, where he advised Fortune 100 companies on new product innovation and brand positioning. Weber has a BA in psychology from Columbia University. He resides in Atlanta with his wife, Jennifer, and son, Avi. You can follow him on Twitter @BrandedCortex.

Book preview

PART I

The Brain-Brand Connection

Introduction to Part I: The Brain-Brand Connection

Does anyone think ads work on them? Most consumers—and especially marketers—feel they’re immune to the siren calls of marketing. We wouldn’t be so foolish as to see or hear something from a brand and then blindly follow along. We’re thinking, rational creatures after all, capable of making our own choices. Or so we think. The mind is a tricky thing. We may be very aware of our own state of being—what we see, hear, think, and feel—but what we can’t see, or know directly, is how our brain is working. We can’t see behind the scenes. We have conscious access to just the tip of the iceberg of information—what’s most necessary to know in the moment—but there is so much more going on. As marketers, it behooves us to take a peek behind the curtain, to see what makes us who we are, and makes us do what we do. To do that, we must understand the brain. There is a tendency in our culture to draw a sharp divide between the physical and the mental, between the flesh of the body, the brain, and the intangible, thinking mind. Without getting too philosophical or religious, for the purposes of this book we’ll think of the brain and mind as inextricably linked, and really as one and the same thing. In Part I, the goal will be to introduce some of the basic processes for how the brain works so we can build on that understanding in the following sections. Obviously, neuroscience and its related fields are immensely complex. We will barely scratch the surface in these few pages, but I will try to stick to the most pertinent, fascinating, and thought-provoking facts to help us build the story for how brands live in our brains. Here’s a quick tour for what we’ll go through in Part I:

Chapter 1 will start by getting you acquainted with the three-pound lump in your head. We’ll look at how consciousness evolved to help keep us alive (not to navigate the modern world). We’ll then explore how we perceive the world around us—how we effortlessly create a beautiful and coherent mental image of the world, and how this is often not the reality we think it is.

Then we’ll look at the role of attention in Chapter 2 and how it relates to brands. Attention is coveted currency among advertisers, but we’ll see how our assumptions about it are often wrong.

In Chapter 3, we’ll look at the different types of memory—particularly the unconscious ones—and how we experience memory can be very different from reality.

We will then dive into the true meaning of emotions in Chapter 4, how they are often misunderstood—especially among marketers—and how they influence our decision-making.

Lastly, Chapter 5 will go deeper into how we humans make decisions, how much of what influences our decisions is outside of our awareness, and how irrational we really are.

To me, there is nothing more fascinating than the strange and amazing ways in which the brain works, and I hope you will gain an appreciation for this as well. If you’d like to go deeper, there are other books that go much further into the science of the brain in relation to brands and marketing, and you can find my recommendations for those at www.daryl-weber.com.

CHAPTER 1

Beauty is in the Brain of the Beholder

How Brands Enter the Mind

Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with