Beyond Brand Storytelling: Using Neuroscience to Create Essence
Key points for how brands can apply the neuroscience of essentialism:
Research in neuroscience suggests that we have a tendency towards psychological essentialism: we don’t just appreciate an object’s physical features. We also perceive it’s hidden essence; it’s soul
This is especially true for the essence of a brand’s product. The essence of a product deeply impacts how the consumer values it
Marketers can directly craft the essence of their products through clever brand storytelling
In 2004, a piece of chewing gum sold for $14,000 on eBay. The gum didn't confer any special qualities. It didn't promise to endow the new owner with immortality. Heck, it didn't even taste good. So why the exorbitant price?
Brittany Spears inadvertently spat it out. One "lucky" concert attendee caught the gum, listed it on eBay, and was handsomely rewarded.
If you're prone to think that dropping $14k on a piece of used chewing gum is a little crazy, you're in good company. But for the right person, there's a bustling market for all kinds of celebrity items. During Kanye West's 2015 "Yeezus" tour, literal bags of air from his shows fetched upwards of $500. Justin Timberlake's leftover scraps of French Toast went for over $3000, while a snippet of Justin Beiber's hair drove a $40k price tag at a charity auction.
There's a lot to say about what these sales indicate about modern celebrity culture. But when we dig deeper, we can easily see that this isn't a new trend. And, as we'll see, it isn't limited to celebrity culture at all.
Certain, specific things are valued drastically more than other things of that same category. Any ordinary piece of gum is worth about 20 cents. But a particular piece of gum - perhaps previously in the mouth of our favorite celebrity? Potentially priceless.
Understanding this comes down to a strange quirk of human nature: the neuroscience of essentialism. And it goes beyond the simple impact of celebrity ownership. Instead, it's a fundamental feature of how we value objects (and products!) that we encounter. Because of this, it can provide a massive edge to clever brands, who can harness this phenomenon to drive consumer psychology.
But first: what exactly is psychological essentialism?
The Neuroscience That Drives Psychological Essentialism
As crazy as Brittany Spears' chewing gum is, there's always been a massive market for celebrity items. JFK's rocking chair was bought for $60k, while Audrey Hepburn's working script for Breakfast at Tiffany's fetched nearly $1M. In 2017, Paul Newman's Rolex went for $17M.
Psychological essentialism isn't a new fad. Instead, it’s a broad feature of human neuroscience: our brain is sensitive to what it perceives as the deep essence of an object. You can think of the essence as an object’s soul; it’s the hidden nature that supersedes the thing’s physical parts.
So is it just that we like things once owned by celebrities? That may be part of it, but essentialism cuts much deeper. It's about how our brain forms these fundamental beliefs - real or imagined - about the object's history. It's the story of the thing that infuses it with a deeper essence, which in turn, inflates its value. Celebrity ownership is simply one type of history that an object could have.
These essentialist tendencies are fundamental to human neuroscience, and we can see them from an early age. Essentialism seems to be one of the reasons, for example, that children place such a heavy emphasis on THAT specific, sentimental toy. There's no previous celebrity ownership there, but that teddy bear has its own unique story, infusing it with a powerful essence.
The psychologist Paul Bloom tested this idea directly with a slightly mischievous experiment. He tricked young children into believing that he had made exact copies of their favorite stuffed animals. He then gave children a simple choice about which one they wanted to take home: the original or the duplicate. It wasn't even close. Despite being physically identical, the replicas were seen as deeply inferior, devoid of the original's essence. Almost unanimously, the children selected the original.
Neuroscientists reason that these essentialist tendencies are very important from a developmental perspective. They help the young brain categorize the objects in their environments, and help build strong, robust concepts. Your Mom doesn’t cease being your Mom just because she got a new haircut, or is wearing unfamiliar lipstick. Our brain creates a broad concept of “Mom”, which doesn’t change as these simple physical attributes do.
As we age, we get more sophisticated in our thinking. However, essentialism remains throughout our lifetimes. At one level, our brains know that objects in the world are simply that - simple, physical objects. But on another level, these simple objects take on an exceptional quality. We see them as having a deep essence; a hidden soul.
So how can brands apply psychological essentialism to marketing?
Psychological Essentialism and Brand Storytelling
At its core, the essence is a belief - whether real or imagined - about the object and its history. Naturally then, as certain things acquire an exciting history, their essence, and therefore their value, increases dramatically. The slow accumulation of history is great for heritage products. But clearly, not all brands have the luxury of waiting around for these events to naturally transpire. Thankfully, there's another technique that can be just as powerful: brand storytelling.
What's the difference between an ordinary object and a valuable treasure? The story.
One of the best examples of this comes from the Significant Objects Project. A team of anthropologists tested the impact of stories by purchasing a series of ordinary objects such as cups, binders, and Pez dispensers. These objects were as bland and simple as possible, and the average price for each was $1.25. Then came the storytelling. They called up a few friends who happened to be writers and had them make up a unique story for each of these objects. They then re-auctioned the items on eBay and included these stories in the product description. Each object now had an essence.
The average price for each object went from $1.25 to well over $100! Not a bad return on investment.
Stories are powerful. But they don't just impact economics. The essences they create can profoundly impact our raw experience of pleasure. This proves especially true in the domain of taste, where our perception is especially prone to suggestion. Imagine being at a nice restaurant, about to dig into a delicious plate of seafood that the waiter has just sent down. But before you do, the chef comes out and shares the inspiration behind it: She tells you about her childhood, growing up near the coast, and how it gave her a lifelong obsession with the sea.
What the chef has just done is instill the dish with an essence. Research has found that patrons enjoy this kind of storytelling, and that it enhances the dining experience. Most impressively, though, controlled studies find that it makes the food itself taste better.
Similar research has found similar effects for wine as well. A glass of wine poured from the same bottle tastes reliably better if you're told it comes from a region with a strong reputation for wine, such as Northern California, instead of a place that doesn't, such as North Dakota.
When done right, a little essence can go a long way.
Final Thoughts on Essence in Marketing
Humans are strange, quirky creatures. When evaluating the products we interact with, we don't just go off the simple sensory features - how it looks, feels, or tastes. Instead, we see into the object's soul; the essence. It's a quirky element of our consumer psychology and a powerful form of neuroscience-based branding.
The essence of a product comes down to its story. Histories accumulate naturally through time and, as we've seen, are galvanized through things like celebrity ownership. And thankfully for brands, they can do more than simply wait in the front row of a Brittany concert.
Through clever storytelling, brands can actively craft a product's essence. And in doing so, significantly enhance its value.
Photo by Karina Miranda on 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
References for “The Neuroscience of Essentialism: Why Brands Need It”
Ahn, W. K., Taylor, E. G., Kato, D., Marsh, J. K., & Bloom, P. (2013). Causal essentialism in kinds. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 66(6), 1113-1130.
Bauer, H. (Oct, 2017) Paul Newman's 'Paul Newman' Rolex Daytona Sells For $17.8 Million, A Record For A Wristwatch At Auction, Forbes
Bloom, P. (2001). Précis of how children learn the meanings of words. Behavioral and brain Sciences, 24(6), 1095-1103.
Frost, K. (Sep, 2017) One of Audrey Hepburn's personal belongings just broke world auction records
Gelman, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2000). Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it. Cognition, 76(2), 91-103.
Johnson, M. and Ghuman, P. (2020) Blindsight: The (mostly) hidden ways marketing reshapes our brains, BenBella Press
Wansink, B., Payne, C. R., & North, J. (2007). Fine as North Dakota wine: Sensory expectations and the intake of companion foods. Physiology & behavior, 90(5), 712-716.
