Name: Branding Between the Ears
Rating: 4.4 (155 reviews)
Author: Sandeep Dayal

Branding Between the Ears summary

Sandeep Dayal

Using Cognitive Science to Build Lasting Customer Connections

4.4 (155 ratings)

21 mins

What is Branding Between the Ears about?

Branding Between the Ears (2021) explores how marketers can apply the latest scientific insights to their branding strategy. It explores how the human brain responds to advertising, and how consumers really make the decision to buy or not to buy.

Table of Contents

What’s in it for me? Make your branding message stick.

Are you throwing everything you’ve got at branding but can’t seem to translate your efforts into hard sales? Perhaps you're spending big on advertising only to find that consumers can’t tell your brand apart from all the rest.

If all this sounds familiar, then this Blink is here to help.

You’ll discover why most of what you’ve been told about branding is wrong. We’ll unpick the myths and half-truths surrounding marketing, and replace them with solid scientific insights into how the brain works when it makes buying decisions.

Packed with the latest research into consumer psychology, this is your introduction to branding that gets results.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

why you should never present your brand’s benefits as a list;
what your choice of dog can teach you about consumer behavior; and
how to build a unique bond with your target consumers.

An emotional consumer is a forgetful one.

What is it that makes an ad effective?

A lot of times, what we think will work – an idea that feels sensible, or a classic advertising strategy – actually ends up sabotaging what we’re trying to do.

Here’s an example. The advertisers working for the arthritis drug Enbrel thought they’d found a great strategy.

Their TV ad highlighted the biggest danger of leaving arthritis untreated. They showed this adorable little boy telling his young mother that he was afraid she’d end up in a wheelchair if she kept ignoring her arthritis symptoms. He’s confused, he’s scared, and he’s worried about the person he loves most. The ad then told viewers how people with arthritis could avoid that fate: by taking their medication.

The advertisers did this because they knew that people are more likely to remember something if it triggers their emotions.

But, when the whole thing aired, they noticed a problem: while people remembered the ad itself, no one remembered the brand.

Now, it is true that people remember things more when their emotions are triggered but it’s not the whole story.

When people have an emotionally charged experience, like watching a sad commercial, they’re more likely to remember the central element of the experience. But – and this is the caveat we have to keep in mind here – they are also more likely to forget any peripheral information surrounding that experience.

In the case of this Enbrel ad, the peripheral information was the brand itself! The problem was that viewers were so busy with their emotional experience, that the overall message – to buy the arthritis medication – didn’t get through.

This little debacle shows why it’s so important to keep a balance between an ad’s emotional content and its branding message.

This is a balance that Steve Jobs – you know, the famous founder of Apple – understood really well.

In the early 2000s, Apple shot hundreds of ads for the Apple Mac, but only a handful of them ended up airing. And it’s interesting because the ads that didn’t make the cut were actually the funniest. They depicted this ongoing battle between an uptight PC user and a laid-back, cool Mac user. Fun, catchy, cute.

But Jobs somehow knew that viewers would be so busy laughing at the ad’s characters that they’d end up paying little attention to the overall message of the ad: to buy the computer.

If you’re a marketer, you probably think a lot about store shelves and billboards, or TV ads and product placement. But how much thought are you giving to the only real branding space that matters: your customers’ brains. We now know that the human brain is where all important branding takes place.

And still, we see countless examples of these concepts that have been used in marketing forever – like that emotion triggers memory – still being used. A lot of times these are outdated, or, like in this case, only part of the truth.

Shape your branding to chime with consumers’ unconscious preferences.

Sometimes inspiration strikes in the strangest of places. Let me ask you – do you know anyone who looks just a little bit like their dog? When you see them out together, they just have the same style somehow, or the same expressions. If you have a dog, it might even be you.

Key ideas in Branding Between the Ears