By: Bert Zethof

Marketing experts have long talked about the power of the unconscious mind in making purchase decisions. It is as if the brain has both an impulsive side that deals in associations and emotions and a reasoning side that deals in information and judgment. The general consensus is that it is the impulsive side that decides which product a customer buys.

Now a study of brain scans by John-Dylan Haynes, a professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, seems to confirm the science behind this marketing truth. It showed that people settle on a decision as much as ten seconds before they were aware of making the decision. The science reinforces the importance of responding to the customer's perceptions. This does not mean to manipulate the customer, but to understand and satisfy the customer's perceived needs by tapping into the unconscious decision making process.

How does this inform your marketing communications decisions? It invites you to evaluate your messaging to determine if you are effectively connecting to your customer’s unconscious mind. Are you appealing to their emotions, their emotional reasons for making decisions? Or are you burying them under the logical facts and features about you and your product or service? What is the emotional appeal of what you are offering? What are you customers really hoping for? For example, is it a new energy efficient washer and drier with all the bells and whistles they are after? Or is it the assurance that they didn’t overspend on these appliances and that they won’t have buyer’s remorse? Or is that they really do care about their energy bill and the environment?