About Neuroscience, whorehouses and advertising

With some of the claims made about the way the human brain makes decisions that are popularised in the media in the name of neuro-marketing, it appears possible that the reputation of marketing might easily decline to what it was in those days.

The 1970s was an era when The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard was popular. There was a paranoid belief that advertisers were using subliminal persuasion techniques to make consumers buy things they don’t need. This was against a background where brainwashing was a popular topic during the Cold War. Freud’s claim that people were not even aware of their desires was popular. Freud saw people as small pieces of consciousness floating like flotsam on a sea of non-consciousness, and this sea was filled with dark desires that people were not themselves conscious of.

Today, more is learnt by neuroscientists about human decision-making than ever before. Unfortunately much of this is again reported in popular media as that people are driven by sub-conscious desires that they are not aware of and that advertisers exploit these subconscious irrational desires. (Note that Freud never used the term ‘subconscious’ and argued against the existence of such a thing.) This creates similar circumstances to the 1970s and could damage the reputation of advertising and marketing in the same way.

When a company’s employees believe that the company – or, its marketing department – is basically fooling people into buying an inferior product, it becomes more difficult to motivate the staff. On the other hand, when the staff believes that they are enriching people’s lives, they automatically become more loyal to the company and motivated in what they do.

It is the responsibility of management to ensure that the marketing activities of their company are understood by all employees to be ones that contribute to the quality of people’s lives – i.e. that they make people happier.

The fundamental issue is whether management (and the advertising agency) believes that their customers are making irrational decisions when they buy the brand; i.e. whether the company is fooling the public.

Brand choice decisions are like other decisions people make using the same brain mechanisms. Decisions are driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that’s often called the reward chemical. Dopamine is well known as the brain chemical that underlies many drug addiction. As such, it generally gets negative press. When people read that brand choices are the results of dopamine’s actions in the brain this already gives marketing a negative connotation. It sounds as if marketers are trying to cause irrational addictions to their brands.

The way that dopamine influences brand choice is thus:

© Seybo – 123RF.com

When the body feels good (at the time of consuming a brand) the brain secretes dopamine via the dopaminergic neurons. This makes the brain feel good, and lays down a memory that whatever the body is doing is causing it to feel good. Under normal circumstances the dopamine is simply re-absorbed by the neurons so that the brain returns to a normal state. (Drugs work by either causing the brain to secrete too much dopamine to re-absorb, or interferes with the re-uptake of dopamine so that the brain doesn’t return to a normal state, i.e. nothing like in the normal working of the system.)

After the body had a pleasant experience, when the brain thinks about the pleasant experience it had, the memory of the dopamine is invoked. Technically, a memory is just neurons that become stimulated so that the combination of stimulated neurons represents the memory; dopaminergic neurons are part of the stimulated neuronal group and the stimulation causes dopamine to be secreted. It is now known that the brain secretes dopamine even when it only thinks about the pleasant experience it had. This is why you literally feel good when you have pleasant memories. This is also why you seek out experiences where you had pleasant memories.

The human brain is a machine that excels at interpreting the environment and predicting how it will make the body feel. This is how the avoid/approach decision is made.

When one sees a brand, as one walks through a store whilst the brain interprets the environment (brands), the memory of how the brand will make the body feel comes to the fore. This happens in the form of the brain producing dopamine in the nucleus accumbens – situated just behind the forebrain.

Dopamine is produced by dopaminergic neurons, which largely behave like all neurons, so this happens as part of the normal processing of neurons. The importance of this is that one knows what one is observing, and how it will make you feel, is part of the same process.

The interpretation of the environment – in the case of sight – starts in the retina. From there the optical nerves carry impulses to the occipital region in the back of the brain. Interpretation then proceeds via a process of neurons recruiting other neurons from here via the mid-brain and the nucleus accumbens to the frontal lobes.

Thinking, or consciousness, happens in the frontal lobes. With the process of interpretation happening from the back to the frontal lobes, it means that the frontal lobes are presented with two pieces of information based on memories: What the thing you see (brand) is, and how it will make the body feel. With this information available the brain can consider what to do. In many cases the brain does not have to think about which brand to buy – it simply buys the brand that will make it feel best when it is consumed.

Unfortunately, this is also where some misreporting (sensationalising) about the process happens.

The midbrain responds by indicating an approach-avoid (the dopamine reaction) feeling and this happens prior to the frontal lobes considering the decision. This mid-brain reaction happens milliseconds before the message reaches the frontal lobes and can be measured by EEG. Many reporters read into this that the mid-brain reaction is actually the decision. They then conclude that people make their decision before they actually think – i.e. non-consciously.

This then easily leads to the conclusion that people are driven by something they’re not aware of rather than by their rational forebrain processes, and that this is how marketers manipulate people.

This is the basis for the most common brand choice decisions: Habit and repeat purchase.

Consider how inefficient it would be if every time one buys a product one has to consider all the aspects of the different brands. How much more efficient it is that we simply buy the brand which made us feel good last time we consumed it, assuming that it will make us feel good again, or that we believe will make us feel good when we use it.

Due to the increasing number of articles about the discoveries of neuroscience that appear, often with misinterpretations, I will be publishing a series of articles here to help marketers maintain perspective.

It’s important for marketers to understand how advertising interacts with the dopamine system and how this system influences brand choice.

An important take out from this paper, to me, is that companies should promote the importance of marketing to society in general inside the companies – i.e. to other departments.

Marketers should explain to the rest of the company that what the consumers get from the company is not just a product that is well made, at a reasonable cost, in an easily available place. The consumers get an experience that includes the memories of past consumption, past happiness, and especially future expectations of pleasure (dopamine) and that all this is enhanced by the advertising making people aware of this emotional benefits or reminding them of it so that the pleasure of their lives are enhanced.

This should be done at company conferences, seminars, newsletters, and even with in-factory promotions, similar to in-store promotions.