Brand Blink: Understanding the Mind to get to the Heart of Buying Decisions

Malcolm Gladwell enlightens our thinking with his book Blink, a fascinating exploration of how decisions are made in the blink of an eye, before consumers even realize they’re making a decision. He suggests “we think without thinking.”

Gladwell’s effort to share emerging insights into how our brains work is timely. In this decade, we are learning more about how humans think and feel and what drives our behavior than the whole of our discoveries in the time since Sigmund Freud dreamt up the idea of psychoanalysis. This has profound implications for marketing and brand professionals. As it turns out, these developments are revealing just how faulty and inadequate conventional research methods are when it comes to truly understanding consumers.

WHAT’S BEHIND BLINK?
In Blink, Gladwell urges that people make decisions through rapid cognition and a concept known as thin-slicing—the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. More than we realize, we evaluate a situation or a brand and frame our response before we ever consciously think about it. When we thin-slice, we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this process of editing unconsciously. We first see and perceive a color several hundred milliseconds before we can think or say “red light.” Our foot seeks the brake long before we actually think about stopping, that is, if we think about it at all.

As Gladwell warns, “while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct. Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy. But the truth is that it isn’t, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact.

FINDING BRAND BLINK 

 Buying decisions are made on promises that transcend products, and promises are rooted in human emotions.  Quite simply, brands are built on trust. Making and keeping promises builds trust which is among the most basic of human emotions. To impact our company’s bottom line, we need to get in touch with our customers’ emotions.  As marketers, we must have our own blink moments and embrace the reality that branding is about “brain surgery” and psychology. Because how your customers feel about your brand isn’t a casual question.  It is the crucial question.