Brain analytics will be revolutionary for marketing and (commercial) conversation

The latest scanning techniques allow us get to know more about the brain and abstract notions such as sense, belief and emotion. Neurotechnology - new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains - is now also being applied to marketing.

In the same way that Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and DNA changed the way we see the world, so will neurotechnology be disruptive for marketing. The latest scanning techniques allow us to find out which elements of advertising are most efficient for durable branding.

Information about the brain is the holy grail for marketing. We will ‘be able to look inside the brain and predict what consumers want’ and then ‘start selling consumer goods that are aimed directly at our receptive nervous system’. Research already showed that products that are highly appreciated activate the part of the brain that is also involved in self-identification. That alone could be used to influence consumer behavior.

Our conscience, our subjective perception of the world is the result of billions of neurons giving each other tiny electric shocks. Our brains are plastic masses that are continually moving and thus ever-changing. All our emotions are made up out of chemical processes.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.



It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, looking from the top down, What you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components.

1. Our newest brain, our homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language.

2. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains. And our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

When we communicate from the outside in, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. You know, sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making, doesn't control language. And the best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart, or you're leading with your soul. Well, I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in you limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language.

But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how you ever get people to buy something from you? The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And if you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation. The first two and a half percent of our population are our innovators. The next 13 and a half percent of our population are our early adopters. The next 34 percent are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.

We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration. And then the system tips. And I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new business?" And they love to tell you, "Oh, it's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can trip over 10 percent of the customers. We all have about 10 percent who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right. That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it." The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before you're doing business with them versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap, that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "crossing the chasm." Because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available.



Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural. Disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do. And the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B. And that's called association learning.



We have the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is.

Now the problem here is that 'patternicities' will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a type one and a type two error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations.

So the default position is just "believe all patterns are real. There was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns.

The propensity to find the patterns goes up when there's a lack of control.

Significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere. So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere. Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity takes place.




Watch Gero Miesenboeck's FROM: 'If we record the activity of all neurons, we would understand the brain' TO 'If we control the activity of some neurons, we would learn much about the brain'.