What lurks beneath the surface?

Recent findings in neuropsychology have really been a rude awakening for marketers. It is now estimated that up to 95% of what goes on in our brains is below the level of consciousness. The existence of the unconscious and its effect on human behaviour is absolutely irrefutable (7).

As Wendy Gordon says (1), people remain inexplicable and unpredictable. What they say is not what they do, feel or think and never will be. People continue to struggle to articulate how they think and feel about brands. No matter what we discover, nothing will change this.

But we do have some useful models now to help us deal with this unpredictability. Let's take brand associations. The brain has immense capacity, and this capacity applies to brands as well as everything else. An experiment carried out in the 1970s by Lionel Standing (8) shows that the brain can store and recognise up to ten thousand brands with an alarming degree of accuracy.

But these brand associations are not stored fully-formed in one part of the brain - the brand is broken into thousands of tiny shards of information that are stored and processed in different areas. Brains are made up of trillions of cells, called neurons. Each one has a series of dendrites, finger-like tendrils growing out of it.

There is a small gap, a synapse, between the dendrites of one cell and those of another. As one neuron is stimulated it fires up. There is a chemical reaction across one synapse to the next neuron, which stimulates the next neuron along, which in turn stimulates the next, and so on. A memory - and a brand association - consists of a whole interconnected series of firings.

So what are the implications of this kind of knowledge? What are the key facts we can draw from neuroscience and apply to our everyday work? Here are four useful "NeuroFacts".
 

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