alcolm 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.
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” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 155).
FINDING BLINK
Brains are pattern machines. (Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2004) These patterns make blink moments possible. But, if you are a marketer looking to capitalize on a blink phenomenon, be aware the brain cannot command itself to go into “think blink” mode. Instead, it involuntarily retrieves from memory the feelings that drive blink encounters. Our brain does not remember exactly what it sees, hears or feels. We don’t remember or recall things with complete fidelity—not because the cortex and its neurons are sloppy or error-prone, but because the brain remembers the important relationships in the world, independent of details. (Hawkins, 2004)
Brains are pattern machines. (Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2004) These patterns make blink moments possible. But, if you are a marketer looking to capitalize on a blink phenomenon, be aware the brain cannot command itself to go into “think blink” mode. Instead, it involuntarily retrieves from memory the feelings that drive blink encounters. Our brain does not remember exactly what it sees, hears or feels. We don’t remember or recall things with complete fidelity—not because the cortex and its neurons are sloppy or error-prone, but because the brain remembers the important relationships in the world, independent of details. (Hawkins, 2004)
The relationships we feel are important in our world are stored as images in our unconscious mind and are linked directly to our emotions. In fact, we don’t really think in words, but more in pictures or images. The brain is elegantly designed to store whole concepts within an image. We store memories as images because they are more meaningful and easier to access quickly and automatically. Emotions are largely responsible for creating these memories and are the key to unlocking the meaning within.
It is critical for marketers to understand the role of emotions in human decision making and behavior. Raised in Western culture, we are well indoctrinated in the forces of logic and reason, but we’ve lost sight of the essential role emotions play in determining human behavior. In fact, all human behavior is driven by emotional input derived from these stored visualizations. There are two systems in the brain. One is for logic and reason. It resides in the neocortex, the outer layer. The other is found in the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain. The emotional components appear in very discreet, well-identified and interconnected regions of the brain. The interconnection occurs in a handful of brain sites that are collectively known as the limbic system. One site in the system, the amygdala, is the brain region responsible for the subjective experience of the emotion. Another site, the hypothalamus, is responsible for triggering the physiological response of the emotion. The hypothalamus, amygdala, and cortex all feed back on each other in a complex alchemy of emotion and reason to coordinate the appropriate behavioral response. This information is also saved and stored by a third member of the limbic system, the hippocampus. All of these brain regions, from the higher cortex to lower limit systems, converge in a single brain region known as the cingulate cortex. It is in the cingulate cortex that decisions are made. Reason and emotion commingle and we are able to coordinate our emotional response to direct our actions and thoughts.
One very important scientific aspect of this whole process is that we know the decision making process does not work in the absence of an emotional signal from the limbic system. Left to its own devices, the consciously thinking part of the brain is incapable of making a decision. The implications of this for marketers are inescapable.
NIRAJ KUMAR
PGDM 3RD.SEM
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