How Can You Influence Consumer Behavior by Tapping Into the Unconscious Mind?

Ready to Grow Your Mind Share? How Can Building a ‘Brand Connectome’ Help You Win Customers Without Hard Selling?

Discover The Power of Instinct by Leslie Zane and learn why the unconscious mind drives modern consumer decisions. This guide outlines practical steps to nurture your ‘brand connectome,’ utilize sensory triggers, and eliminate negative associations to ensure your brand thrives in a crowded marketplace.

Don’t let your marketing efforts get lost in the noise—read the full summary below to learn the exact sensory triggers that will wire your brand directly into your customers’ instincts.

Genres

Marketing, Sales, Communication Skills, Personal Development, Career Success

Meet the new rules of persuasion

The Power of Instinct (2024) explores the role of instinctual behavior in decision-making and persuasion, particularly within business and marketing. It delves into how understanding and leveraging innate human instincts can lead to more effective communication, influence, and success, and offers practical strategies for harnessing these natural tendencies.

Every day, we’re bombarded with thousands of messages and advertisements, making it increasingly difficult for any single brand to stand out. This cluttered landscape requires new rules of persuasion. Rules that don’t rely on the traditional – and now outdated – means of overwhelming your audience’s conscious minds with reams of information. 

Understanding that your consumers’ choices are more influenced by unconscious forces than by deliberate reasoning can revolutionize your marketing approach. The most successful brands harness this knowledge, tapping into their audience’s intricate neural networks of associations and memories to create a strong, lasting presence. By focusing on the unconscious mind, you, too, can build instinctive brand preference, where consumers automatically choose your brand without a second thought.

So, in this summary, you’ll learn how to do just that. First, we’ll explore the importance of targeting the unconscious mind and why it’s more effective than traditional methods of persuasion. Next, we’ll delve into nurturing your “brand connectome”, the network of associations that make your brand memorable. We’ll then discuss practical strategies for growing positive connections with your audience, using sensory triggers to enhance brand recall. Finally, we’ll cover the crucial task of identifying and weeding out the negative associations that can harm your brand’s image and loyalty. By understanding and applying these insights, you can enhance your brand’s impact and influence, ensuring it thrives – not just survives – in today’s competitive marketplace. 

Instinct rule 1: Target the unconscious mind

The traditional rules of persuasion state you should overwhelm your audience with information, aiming to bombard and thus capture their conscious mind. We needn’t look any further than social media today, where brands feel compelled to maintain constant interaction with their consumers, to see this approach in full swing. However, the sheer volume of advertisements we encounter each day – ranging from 4,000 to 10,000 – means that most messages fail to stick.

While the traditional rules for gaining a competitive edge suggest seemingly common sense strategies such as being the cheapest, offering feature-filled products, or targeting finely sliced market segments, they overlook a crucial element: their audience’s unconscious mind.

Modern neuroscience has revealed that our behaviors are significantly more influenced by unconscious forces – such as perceptions and memories – than hard facts or objective information. In fact, perceptions and memories are far from intangible imaginings or vague recollections; they are concrete and measurable. Interactions that leave a lasting impact can reshape our brain’s pathways, creating strong associations with the related brand or idea. Our minds operate by drawing from this complex network of perceptions, memories, and associations to reach intuitive – not intentional – conclusions swiftly.

Therefore, to actually sway your consumers in today’s world, it’s essential to target their unconscious minds. Successful brands use their consumer’s network of neural connections to their advantage, creating a larger mental presence, leading to what is known as instinctive brand preference. Instinctive brand preference is when your audience automatically and repeatedly chooses your brand without conscious deliberation – when their perceptions, memories, and associations make it nearly impossible for them to even consider an alternative.

The new rules of persuasion tell us that success in the marketplace comes not from actual superiority but from perceived superiority. In the following sections, we’ll explore three specific strategies for speaking to your consumer’s unconscious minds, skyrocketing your brand’s impact and influence in the process. 

Instinct rule 2: Nurture your brand connectome

That our choices are guided more by our unconscious minds than our conscious minds can be an uncomfortable truth to swallow. But you can use this knowledge to work for your brand. And if you seek to survive in today’s marketplace, you must.

The brain’s wiring system is known as the human connectome. The human connectome is the complex network we were introduced to in the last section that works behind the scenes and shapes our perspectives. Similarly, we can think of brand connectomes as containing all our brand-related associations and driving all our brand-related decisions.

It follows, then, that brands with extensive, positive connectomes would be more influential, while those with limited or negative connectomes would struggle to sway. And, indeed, this is the case. As with our memories, brands that occupy significant mental space are more likely to be deemed salient than those that don’t.

One powerful way successful brands take up brain terrain is by creating a comprehensive brand world with unique values, settings, and, sometimes, even their own words or phrases. These brand worlds engage consumers in an all-encompassing way, increasing the likelihood of becoming tied to existing and related touchpoints in their audience’s unconscious minds. In doing so, brands build their mind share, which – as you may have guessed by now – is a crucial precursor to building the brand’s market share.

Fortunately, there’s no barrier to entry: your brand can do the same as those who’ve done it best. One smart place to start is by analyzing your competitors and identifying their weaknesses. You can then use these insights to position your brand strategically, crafting your brand’s connectome to fill holes or gaps in the market. From here, you’ll want to proactively foster more associations in your consumer’s minds – something we’ll unpack further in the next section.

As our brains learn about and form new connections with a brand, that brand’s connectome occupies greater real estate in our minds. This relative mind share is an excellent indicator of a brand’s growth and health, with brands that dominate our brains invariably being the brands that dominate in business. 

Instinct rule 3: Grow positive connections

As promised, it’s time to look at how you can practically and tactically foster more associations in your consumers’ minds. Spoiler alert: effectively influencing consumer behavior hinges on cultivating positive associations with your brand.

While no marketing plan could honestly claim to compel people to purchase your product or sample your service, you certainly can increase your chances by altering your audience’s instinctive responses through strategic positive connections.

As discussed in the last section, the new laws of persuasion state marketing should aim to grow your brand connectome. Ideally, by continually cultivating positive associations and perceptions and, further, by engaging as many of the senses as possible.

We can think of images, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures as triggers. These triggers tap into existing memories and feelings in the consumer’s unconscious mind, deepening neural connections and expanding the brand’s mental presence. It may go without saying, but the more triggers you can touch, the more likely it is you’ll increase your foothold.

Therefore, integrating a range of triggers into your communications, customer experience, and products or services can enhance your perceived salience and substantially drive business. Unlike transient emotional ads, these triggers form enduring connections by aligning with your audience’s existing memories and perceptions. Humans do, after all, crave the familiar.

It can be helpful to start by identifying the triggers fundamental to your brand’s category. Mountain imagery is a common visual trigger amongst water brands, for instance, while fast-food stores may rely on pumping out sweet or salty aromas.

In fact, it’s wise to pay particular attention to your visual and olfactory triggers, as these are especially powerful. Images are processed twice in our brains – once as an image and once as a word – thus taking up more mental real estate, and smells and scents tend to elicit stronger emotional responses than other sensory inputs.

By leveraging these sensory triggers and incorporating them into every marketing touchpoint, you can develop an expansive and resilient brand connectome, rich with positive connections. But what about the inevitable odd negative association, you may ask? That’s where we’re headed next. 

Instinct rule 4: Weed out negative associations

The traditional rules of persuasion would tell you the obstacle to your brand’s success is the market conditions. The new rules of persuasion will tell you it’s the negative associations attached to your brand.

Humans naturally lean towards negativity, giving negative information disproportionately more weight. Thus, when unchecked negative perceptions dominate your brand connectome, you can quickly slip into last place or disappear from consumers’ radars altogether.

Positive and negative connections embed themselves in our neural pathways and shape our brand connectomes in the same way. Regular exposure to negative information can strengthen negative perceptions, damaging brand loyalty and growth, just as regular positive information can enhance it. Hence, constant monitoring and management of these associations are vital for maintaining a healthy brand image.

You can think of negative associations like weeds choking out the positive perceptions you have carefully cultivated. Negative associations are correlated strongly with stagnant or declining revenue, so whenever your brand’s growth falters, you’ll want to quickly start investigating the source and nature of negative perceptions your brand has accrued.

Even if your brand seems free from negative perceptions, it’s wise to check in periodically. Prevention is always better – and less expensive – than cure.

Fortunately, most negative associations can be countered by reintroducing strong and plentiful positive ones. The brain’s learning process, which involves forming new connections and pruning old ones, facilitates this rewiring, but the earlier you can nip negativity in the bud, the easier the rewiring will be.

That said, the size of your brand connectome is the defining factor, which is why large brand connectomes can overshadow smaller competitors – even if it has some negative associations. Ideally, you’ll want to double down on growing positive connections, but at the end of the day, your brand does need to occupy some brain terrain to become the instinctive brand preference.

Nurturing your brand connectome, growing positive connections, and weeding out negative associations may sound like yet another contrived “your brand is a garden” marketing metaphor. However, in this instance, it could well be the critical difference between your brand thriving or barely surviving in today’s crowded market.

Conclusion

In this summary to The Power of Instinct by Leslie Zane, you’ve learned that tapping into people’s subconscious instincts can significantly enhance the impact and influence of communication. By recognizing and appealing to these deep-seated impulses, you can craft messages that resonate more profoundly and drive desired outcomes. 

Instincts govern many of our decisions, often bypassing rational thought processes. By aligning your approaches with these natural tendencies, you can motivate action, foster stronger connections, and achieve greater success. Remember, mind share equals market share, so it’s critical to heed the instinct rules – nurturing your brand connectome, growing your positive connections, and weeding out your negative associations – to enhance your persuasiveness. 

Embracing these principles not only improves brand effectiveness but also facilitates more meaningful and authentic interactions. So, though you may hone these techniques in your professional life, these skills can transcend the walls of your workplace and see you enjoy more impact and influence in your personal life, too.