Being direct... AdVantage May 2004
Those who work with Brands and are driven by a genuine curiosity live in exciting times !!
Science is beginning to explain how our brains really work, and there's good news and bad news!
Sincere congrats to Jean Green and her MARFA organisation. An approach by her last year to get involved in her 2-day qualitative research workshop held in Johannesburg during February - featuring UK-based gurus Roy Langmaid and Wendy Gordon, led us to a much better understanding of how the human brain actually processes information about brands. (If the feedback was anything to go by, the two days made a big impression on ALL the delegates).
First of all, this workshop was deliberately not a 'talking heads' format. The delegates spent most of the first day, and a great deal of the second working in small-ish groups undertaking a variety of tasks aimed at sharing in Roy Langmaid's years of practical research into human understanding. Roy is a trained psychologist and psychotherapist with 25 years experience at the forefront of qualitative research, followed by 12 years experience in facilitating corporate change programmes.
Wendy Gordon grew up in South Africa and studied at Wits, working within the Research industry here, before moving abroad. She has been based in the UK for a number of years now and amongst her many interests, is fascinated by evolving scientific understanding and its influence on marketing/brand thinking. Wendy presented two papers at the Marfa event, and it is on the background to these - that I wish to focus.
For those interested, Amazon.com can provide a copy of 'Brand New Brand Thinking' edited by Merry Baskin and Mark Earls, and published by Kogan Page Limited. Under the chapter heading 'Brands on the Brain' - New scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking, Wendy explores the impact of new scanning technology and cognitive brain research experiments that have enabled us to begin to understand how the brain really works.
Wendy describes her understanding as having been markedly influenced by advertising consultant Giep Frantzen, author of 'The Mental World of Brands' and Mark Solms, a psychoanalist and neuropsychologist who ran a series of UK lectures introducing non-scientists to 'the brain'.
These analyses probe serious questions like: How does the brand live and die in the memory? Where does the concept of a relationship with a brand fit into mental activity? What are thoughts, emotions and feelings, and do people have them about brands in any meaningful way? What are we to think about such concepts as consciousness and the unconscious in relation to brands and brand messages? Are decisions made rationally even for major ticket items like cars and holidays? Is the way that professional marketers, advertisers and researchers talk about brands a reflection of reality, or is it all a fantasy?
According to Wendy, it has been estimated that each of us has about 10 000 brands stored in our brain, and this is not hard to believe when you think about the degree to which we are all exposed to brands literally every waking hour of every day. This means that a single brand could be but one tiny insignificant star within the huge galaxy of brands stored in any single brain. Why should any one grow more brightly? More importantly, how can it be differentiated?
It means that many marketing professionals are perhaps too brand-centric in their thinking. They wear magnified reading glasses to look outside at what is happening in the world. Their vision is blurred and inaccurate. It also means that we need to question the measures we use to determine individual brand strengths or indeed these 'brand-relationships'.
A brand 'in the brain' is nothing more than a web of connecting neurones that 'fire' together in different patterns. It is easy to forget that a brand is not an onion, a pyramid or a diagram on a page. A brand is not a Xerox, a video or a print reproduction that is 'branded' (burnt) onto one part of the brain. It is not a thing. Neither has it a fixed meaning that is 'owned' by any company or an organisation. A brand is a metaphor for a complex pattern of associations ('engram' is the basis for learning/memory) that exists in the heads of individuals (customers, consumers, users, suppliers, analysts, employees etc). It certainly does not just live in the heads of the marketing department.
Wendy made the following three points very strongly indeed: Brain cells that fire together are wired together: Brand associations are strengthened over time through repetition (and weaken over time if not repeated). We encounter brands in a myriad of ways, over time: Each encounter with a brand is a stimulus that is stored in the brain and adds to an individual associative network that already exists. No two people can ever experience the identical set of encounters with a brand, and therefore each individual brand 'engram' will be different.
Finally, marketing people tend to think only of managed communications: like advertising and other paid-for messages to create and maintain brand meaning. Other encounters with a brand are even more important in creating brand meaning, such as the people who represent the brand (employees or other users of the brand); the place that the brand is bought or consumed; and the product/service itself. The brand-centric communication control model is anachronistic. The way that we think needs to be more holistic. Integrated brand communication (including some less-obvious ones) is now a necessity, not merely a matter of choice.
Thanks so much to Roy and Wendy for turning on some really important new searchlights!