The Seven Steps to Branding:
The Process for Behavior Change
What determines which brand a consumer buys, or how they perceive the packaging on their favorite cereal box, or even why they watch a television commercial when they can clearly switch channels? It is all determined by how the brain reacts to the bits of information put before them. What really motivates us to open our wallets and pay for a specific item or brand?
Our approach to marketing draws from unconscious behaviorism and applies neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics to business challenges.
Step One: Interrupt The Pattern
The mind is what the brain does, it is the brain in action, and it works through a process of pattern recognition. If we want to get attention and shift behavioral patterns, we need to interrupt their perceptual patterns by doing something interesting and different.
Step Two: Create Comfort
Humans gravitate to the known, the safe, and the trusted. Although we are attracted to what is different, we move toward the familiar seeking balance, and rely on predictable patterns not just in our biology but also in our environments.
Step Three: Lead The Imagination
The prefrontal cortex gives us the unique ability to plan behavior and create new possibilities. It functions like an alternate reality simulator by giving us the capacity to imagine the benefits of a better life and anticipate the consequences of our actions.
Step Four: Shift The Feeling
We do what we do because of how we feel. We assign value to things through our emotions. Because of the way our brains are wired, emotions influence our thinking more than our thinking influences our emotions.
Step Five: Satisfy The Critical Mind
Consciousness gives us the exclusive ability to rationally reject an idea if it does not make sense based upon our experiences. Often, in order to act, we need to give ourselves logical permission to submit to the emotions and impulses that drive us.
Step Six: Change The Associations
Our minds and our memories work by association. Repetition and emotion strengthen these neural associations so that they become automatic. If we want to change perceptions of anything, we have to change our associations.
Step Seven: Take Action
Our brains exist for movement. Things that don’t move don’t have brains. When we engage in physical actions we represent those experiences through multiple senses of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, giving us more ways to learn from and remember those experience in our mind.
The Six S’s to Success: The Process for Going Viral
The question every marketer in the world wants to know is how to create branded content that spreads effortlessly throughout the Internet. What makes one ad a global cultural phenomenon and another go completely unnoticed?
In this presentation we will unveil the hidden process of why ideas spread online, using the latest from behavioral science and examples of some of the most shared content ever.
Survival
Just as it did in the African plains, we make decisions based on one primary motive – to stay alive – which is why death (or the fear of it) drives so much of our attention.
Surprise
Perhaps the most powerful S, nothing draws a human’s attention like the element of surprise. It is how people learn, forcing us to pay attention to novel and potentially important information. Since brands are learned behaviors, surprise is one of the most important tools in building awareness and making something go viral.
Sustenance
We need food to survive – and also to create like-worthy posts on Instagram. People aren’t just obsessed with food because it’s delicious, but also because instinctually, we recognize it as our primary source of survival, focusing in on a beautifully plated meal like we once focused on a wildebeest in the wild.
Sex
We are survival and replication machines. So our love of food is equaled, if not surpassed, by our fascination with sex, which is why NSFW (Not Safe For Work) memes and messaging are hard to not click and share (just ask Anthony Weiner).
Small Fry
Babies aren’t just cute; they are the continuation of the species, which is why watching children do silly things (like Charlie biting his brother’s finger) doesn’t just draw our attention, it pulls at our most basic human instinct: to survive.
Status
Rejection in hunter-gatherer societies likely meant a death sentence. Without the food, shelter and safety of the tribe, humankind would have been long extinct. Status enables greater access to physical resources like food, shelter, material goods, and mates, which is why we like to watch people’s status grow and shrink across social media.