I really haven't THOUGHT this through

Like many in marketing, I suspect, my understanding of the human brain is cranium-deep.

I’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow, so I know my way round a two-system metaphor.

I’ve heard of a million different biases although I rarely seem to find them useful on brand strategies.

I know something about how certain drugs block the re-uptake of dopamine and how with repeated use the brain adapts, so the same amount of drug delivers less effect and the baseline without it falls lower.

And I only know that because I’ve been working on a project on drug addiction. Even now I’m hoping Claude got that explanation right.

But I don’t really know what happens in someone’s brain when they’re choosing a brand.

The Availability theory is beguiling. You enter a category at a particular time in a particular situation for a particular reason. You’re faced with a number of options and with some degree of probability a particular brand comes into your mind.

So there’s a decent chance you might buy that brand, because at some level you know it’ll do the job.

That knowing bit, though, that’s the tricky part. The big old subject of cognition.

It’s a word I’ve found myself having to look up in the past. I know it’s about knowing. But it embraces all the different ways we do that.

So it’s about perception.

And attention.

And memory.

And learning.

And reasoning.

And language.

Of course, you can be flash and say it’s about neurons and synapses and neurotransmitters and different regions of the brain working together.

Or you can say it’s basically about turning thoughts into actions.

The thing is all this pseudo-neuroscience seems to be like dancing on a lightly iced lake. Sometimes I imagine proper neuroscientists laughing at some of the marketing exchanges on LinkedIn.

The only point I really hang onto is there’s the explicit and the implicit.

As Simon McCarthy wrote recently, on LinkedIn: “We recognise, anticipate, interpret, feel, learn, judge and understand extraordinary complexity without thinking things through explicitly.”

And an apparent lack of conscious deliberation doesn’t mean there’s nothing more going on than see brand, buy brand.

Really, all the sprinkling of neuroscience seems to have done is reduce the marketing discourse to side-taking and name-calling.

I like brands because they are, if you think about it, ridiculously complicated.

But I might need to think this through before posting it.

Too late.