By utilising biology and affective neuroscience, marketers can be more objective and create universal truths. Constantinos Pantidos introduces the benefits of evolutionary marketing
Why do some brands attract us while others do not? What makes a brand relevant? How is meaning produced or triggered by the way we experience specific products and brands? How can we make brands personal at scale? What are the deepest motives that make people keep buying into cars, detergents, ice creams, and toothpastes?
Marketers often spend inordinate amounts of money on various types of research ranging from consumer segmentation to consumer profiling, trend-watching predictions and analyses, demographics, psychographics, semiotics, and so on; all with the aim of making sense of their consumers, their brands and the categories they operate within. However, when they are asked what their brand stands for, marketers often answer in vague terms.
‘Evolutionary marketing’ can measure the motives that make brands desirable and drive the categories they operate in. It is a new science that goes beyond emotions and trends to measure the motives that produce them. It establishes the links between many disciplines in order to quantify the ‘whys’ behind our behaviour. This helps mitigate the arbitrariness, randomness and improvisation of marketing drastically.
Meaning is produced in the psychological and neurophysiological interface creating strong predispositions that guide preferences, linking the rational with emotions, logic with feelings, and logos with pathos.
The pathways of human behaviour
Underlying all behaviour are human dispositions that have enabled us to survive and thrive. As abundant and varied as our emotions are, they all stem from our fundamental human motives. While emotions are evasive and cannot be measured, motives are based in neurobiology, which is more scientifically objective.
Every category and brand is driven by neurobiological motives that imbue brand choice with meaning. By activating the deepest motives driving the category, a brand becomes the most relevant, meaningful choice. By triggering neurobiological motives, brands become personal at scale by inviting the brain to reinterpret them in their own personal way.
The motives that make brands desirable and underdetermine preference can be explained in neurobiological terms and this can improve marketing decision making by reducing haphazardness, subjectivity and improvisation.
The wheel of motives
Our brain forms configurations, groups with internal correspondences and structural equivalents that shape hierarchies of meaning and rhythms into a type of coherent language – the source code of our behaviour. Concepts are nothing other than neural structures that allow us to categorise everything around us. For a brand to take its own place in the fundamental order of our brain, it must have a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in our brain’s ingrained concepts. A brand can be no stronger than its strongest narrative.
By systematising the inherent concepts and their causal chains in our brain, evolutionary marketing can help marketers navigate the chaotic routes our mind uses to create reality. An understanding of the fundamental routes through which emotions arise brings efficiency, clarity, order and predictability to our strategies. Psychological theories are subjective. Biology and affective neuroscience are, by their nature, more scientifically objective. By utilising them in marketing, we can create universal truths that have the power to characterise the species.
The measurement of the motives that drive brands and categories gives us the ability to:
1 Foresee and influence consumer behaviour. To influence emotions, we have to influence the neural activity which produce them. By impacting the mechanisms that underdetermine choice, we proactively incorporate the triggers of emotion into our brand strategy.
2 Develop strategies that imprint their own pathways in the human brain. Brands that satisfy the motives that drive the category and the brand become unstoppable.
3 Severely mitigate subjectivity and the resulting compromise and accommodation that this brings.
4 Develop strategies that cannot be copied as they stem from the guts of the brand and the essence of the category.
5 Build brands on the most stable platform of doing business.
6 Integrate all other types of research.
7 Be reassured that we have everything necessary to maximise the potential of brands and campaigns.
8 Develop one positioning that works for all countries.
9 Expand the target group.
But how are motives triggered? Neurobiology guides us down the perceptual corridors of the human mind and helps us:
A Capture and quantify the motivations driving sales and profit in a category. The level of category understanding determines the accuracy, depth and quality of a proposition and its communication, and the resulting depth of satisfaction and engagement. The brands whose DNA most effectively embed prime motives related to the category are most competitively positioned to achieve sustained growth.
B Perform a deep dive into the DNA of a brand to unearth its core, the deep neurobiological motives behind the brand’s potential for desirability.
C Match the brand’s DNA with the deepest motives driving the category. Successful brands own primary universal territories in our brain. These might have been originally instigated by the character of their creator, their historic DNA and its evolution, their products, names; all of which end up permeating the brand’s culture and communications and are then fine-tuned and reinforced by the consumer.
D Develop the unique neurolanguage of a brand including words, colours, odours, sounds, tastes, materials, typefaces, and shapes, according to their neurobiological impact on the brain instead of judging every element in line with individual views and preferences.
For more details on how to measure and activate the motives that make your brand desirable, please join us at the AMBA webinar, ‘A new science: evolutionary marketing’ on 9 April 2019, at 12pm UK time.
Constantinos Pantidos is the author of Living Brands: How biology & neuroscience shape consumer behaviour & brand desirability. He is the President at UK consultancy, BRAND AVIATORS™, and is a former senior marketing executive with Gillette, P&G and Nestlé in Europe.
