The Neuroscience of Branding
Key points of the neuroscience of branding:
The brand exists in the mind of the market, and in the brains of consumers.
Taken a level deeper, the brand is a pattern of connectivity in the brain's temporal lobes, representing the totality of semantic and emotional associations.
Brands influence every aspect of marketing, deeply impacting consumer psychology and shaping the direct experience of a brand's products.
Understanding the neuroscience of branding comes down to answering a deceptively simple question: Where is the brand?
At one level, the brand rests inside the company that owns it. It's a collection of intellectual property such as logos, mottos, jingles, etc. But these elements are rendered completely useless if they only stay internally. What's the value of a beautiful logo if no one ever sees it?
The power of the brand comes from its external presence. It comes from what the logo comes to symbolize. So where, then, does the brand exist? The brand exists in the mind of the market.
As the branding pioneer Walter Landolf once said, "products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind". Neuroscientifically speaking, the brand is ultimately a pattern of connectivity in consumers' brains. It is the totality of the emotional, and semantic associations that consumers have come to understand that the brand represents. And it's this associative pattern that gives the brand it's symbolic meaning.
Think of a brand, any brand. What is the first thing that comes to mind? If you think of Nike, you'll likely think of "Lebron", "Serena", 'sports', or any number of attributes associated with "athletic excellence". Think of Apple and "innovation", "Steve Jobs", "minimalism", etc., will likely spring to mind.
Everyone is unique and has slightly different associations, but for any well-known brand, there will also be consistent commonalities. Brand perception is idiosyncratic. But if you aggregate everyone's most common associations towards a brand, you get the brand image.
The neuroscience of brand associations
We've located the brand in the brain of consumers. But the brain is big, complex, and multi-faceted. So let's narrow down the neuroscience of branding further.
But first, let's take a step back and see how the brain learns associations in general. The brain is an incredible pattern-detecting organ. It's constantly picking up on the regularities in the environment through a process known as statistical learning, the mechanism by which these associations are learned and maintained.
The first time you heard the word "Nike" you just thought it was a weird-sounding word. But the more you were exposed to broader associations of the brand: "Michael Jordan", "sports", "shoes", the richer the concept becomes. With each new advertisement or exposure to the brand, the more interwoven "Nike" becomes in the brain.
This learning process is complex, but the brain's temporal lobe claims a lion's share of the responsibility. Here you'll find the brain's vast associative network - not just of familiar brands, but for all of the associations we've come to learn. It's a complex, interlocking web of concepts, categories, and information that comprise our knowledge of the world.
And importantly, these concepts aren't stored haphazardly. Their semantic affinity connects them. For example, when you think of "water" all of the adjacent nodes in the network are also activated: "ocean", "lake", "drink" etc.. Concepts that are closely associated, and often spoken about in the same breath, are stored in close physical proximity within the temporal lobe.
The neuroscience of the emotional brand
Of course, brands aren't just these boring bundles of concepts. Brands are deeply emotional. Think of Nike, and you won't just think something; you'll feel something.
The most well-known and beloved brands go deep into our emotional associations. Emotional advertisements can be effective tools for encouraging consumers to buy a given product. But their true power comes from infusing the brand with a pattern of feeling. While we're learning about what something is, we're also learning how it makes us feel. All this occurs in the brain's temporal lobe; the emotional and the semantic are deeply connected. For example, we automatically associate the sound of thunder with lightning and rain, but also with the emotions of alertness and awe.
The temporal lobe is also responsible for this emotional coloration, and through a similar mechanism: building associations through experience.
How strong brands influence consumer psychology
A strong brand doesn't just exist in the mind of the consumer. It profoundly influences how consumers interact with and experience the world. And in doing so, it impacts every other area of marketing. For example, strong brands provide flexibility in pricing, protection against competitor innovation, encouragement for word-of-mouth marketing, and much more. As Branding That Means Business puts it, "having a great brand is like playing the game of capitalism on easy mode".
Perhaps most impressive is how a strong brand can transform consumer psychology. Human perception is subjective, giving the brand ample opportunity to shape the consumer's direct experience. As the Pepsi challenge taught us, people generally prefer Pepsi over Coke when the blindfolds are on. But when consumers know what they're drinking, Coke reigns supreme. When we think we're consuming the product, we're actually consuming the brand.
In this way, strong brands can produce a kind of brand placebo effect, in which their associative power alone shape how we think, feel, and act. For example, in 2011, researchers gave their participants identical, generic sunglasses. However, the experimenters told one group that their glasses were Ray-Bans, and said to the other group that they were merely generic. The group that thought they had Ray-Bans reported that they blocked the sun better.
Swap sunglasses for golf clubs, and you get a very similar effect. Research finds that if you can lead someone to believe their generic golf club is actually a Nike, they'll drive the golf balls about 10% further.
Literally and figuratively, the power of brand associations goes deep.
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Overall, brands matter when, and only when, they matter to consumers. While the brand is a tool of the company, its true power comes from the associations it creates and maintains. Ultimately, at the level of the brain, the brand is a unique pattern of semantic and emotional associations. Understanding a brand's underlying neuroscience is crucial for harnessing its true power.
Photo by Tom Roberts via UnSplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
