Marketing Isn’t Brain Surgery. It’s Neuroscience

If you accept our premise that today, everything is a considered purchase, then how do people decide between competing options?

Easy. You just need to understand neuroscience. Thankfully, The Gate has a PhD of Cognitive Science from Columbia University on staff who can dumb it down for us.

Here’s what Laura said. “Humans aren’t logical. We are not wired to make logical, rational decisions using facts.  Instead, we make choices based on emotion and rationalize with facts.”

Contrary to what we have been told, making a decision is not a neat, cognitive, rational and linear seven-step process starting with “gather information” and ending with “make a decision.”

Over the past 15 years, studies show that our emotion is the actual driving force and the deterministic factor.

Of particular interest, the husband and wife team of neuroscientists, Antonio and Hana Damasio conducted groundbreaking research among people whose feeling side of their brain — the limbic system — was impaired, while their thinking side — the neorcortex was intact.

Do you want to know what they learned?

Regardless of the amount of rational facts they had, these folks could not make a decision. They could precisely describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions.

So, it is the limbic system that is the dominant factor in the brain’s ability to come to a decision.

Here is an example: when you buy the iconic Verner Panton “Stacking Chair” for your living room, you’re not buying it for rational, practical reasons.  There is nothing either practical or comfortable about it. You’re buying it because of the way it made you feel when you spotted it on the showroom floor.

That’s the limbic system in action.

As psychologist Bart Schutz said: “Our brain is not rational.  Our brain is rationalizing.”

So, what does this mean for marketers? Simply that it’s not enough to tell your customers what you’re selling, how it’s made, and who it’s for.

You need to tell them why they should care.

In our next blog, we’ll write about how to make sure customers care about you.