Chapter 5

The Intuitive Consumer: Nonconscious Processes Underlying Consumer Behavior

In This Chapter

Understanding intuitive brain processes

Appreciating how we think nonconsciously

Taking a second look at the purpose of conscious thinking

Identifying three key variables for neuromarketing research

In this chapter, we highlight some important ways our nonconscious minds contribute to our decisions and actions as consumers. First, we discuss the idea that the human brain is a cognitive miser, reluctant to spend any more mental energy than is absolutely necessary to get by in the world. We introduce four brain-processing principles that guide our behavior and simplify our choices as cognitive misers: efficiency, novelty, familiarity, and processing fluency.

Next, we show how the nonconscious mind uses these principles to help us make sense of our world and decide what to do, thousands of times a day. We discuss the brain’s amazing ability to make decisions without consciously thinking about them, and show how a remarkable mechanism called priming can trigger complex choices and actions simply by making connections between ideas in our minds, all happening outside our conscious awareness.

These amazing capabilities of the nonconscious mind lead us to ask what our conscious mind is really good for. Rest assured, conscious thinking is still very important — but for learning and planning, not so much for decision making.

Finally, we apply this new knowledge to provide a deeper understanding of the three master variables that marketers care about most when they think about their consumers’ brains: attention, emotion, and memory.

The Intuitive Consumer Is a Cognitive Miser

A miser is a person who doesn’t like to spend money. A really good miser knows lots of ways to avoid spending money, like coming up with the perfect excuse to make you pay the dinner bill. Our brains are also misers, but the currency they try to avoid spending is mental effort, the amount of cognitive activity needed to decide and act in the world, including deciding and acting as consumers and shoppers.

This tendency toward cognitive miserliness shows itself in many ways in consumer behavior. We describe four important examples in this section:

Efficiency: Our conscious brains are “lazy controllers” of our intuitive evaluations and decisions.

Novelty: We are attracted to novelty and naturally direct our attention to new and interesting things.

Familiarity: We’re drawn to things that are familiar, and we have a natural tendency to equate familiarity with liking.

Processing fluency: We interpret information that is easier to process as more true, persuasive, and likable.

Interpreting our world efficiently

Our brains don’t like to work hard. Mental effort takes energy, and the human brain expends more energy than any other organ in the body. The average brain takes up only about 3 percent of a person’s body weight but consumes about 20 percent of the calories a person takes in every day. So, it has evolved to run efficiently.

In Chapter 2, we introduce Daniel Kahneman and his System 1–System 2 model of mental processing. Kahneman’s model helps us understand an important aspect of mental efficiency, which he calls lazy control. Lazy control is basically the idea that System 2 (the conscious mind) doesn’t watch too closely over System 1 (the nonconscious mind). Because our brains operate more efficiently when we avoid heavy mental effort, our default mechanism is to avoid activating conscious control unless absolutely necessary. Thus, our conscious minds exert only lazy control over our nonconscious processing.

You may guess that our propensity for mental efficiency via nonconscious processing is a bad thing, and we’d be better off if we, like Mr. Spock, disciplined our brains to work harder more often. In fact, there is now considerable evidence that this isn’t the case. Researchers have discovered that expending mental energy to control our behavior depletes our ability to exert control later on. This effect, called ego depletion, makes us more susceptible to temptation and loss of self-control following a bout of heavy mental effort.

For example, in a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Roy Baumeister, people who resisted the temptation to munch on M&M’s or freshly baked cookies were less able to resist other temptations later on. When people were instructed to restrain their emotions during a sad movie, they gave up more quickly on later tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. All these influences of heavy mental effort on later performance occurred outside the participants’ conscious awareness.

The lesson for consumers: If you have to try really hard to control your snacking as part of your new diet, you may find yourself less able to resist buying that bag of cookies the next time you go shopping. The principle of mental efficiency isn’t always the enemy of the wise consumer, as it’s sometimes portrayed. Thinking too much, as well as thinking too little, can cause us to do things we later wish we hadn’t done.

Knowing that people have this built-in tendency for mental efficiency, marketers are faced with an ethical choice: They can either design their marketing efforts to communicate their brand and product stories more effectively at an intuitive level, or try to “play the system” by creating false associations that they hope consumers won’t notice due to their reluctance to engage in conscious, deliberative evaluation. We strongly advise against the second path, not just because it’s deceptive and unethical, but because it’s based on a false premise. Intuitive consumers are much better equipped to identify false associations than unscrupulous marketers may think they are.

Catching our eye with novelty

Consider this scenario (presented by Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence [Times Books]): You walk into your cluttered and messy office one day and notice a blue coffee mug sitting on your desk. You’ve never seen that mug before. You know it’s new. How did you perform this feat, spotting that one new item out of the hundreds of other items in the room?

The answer is that you were exercising a fundamental of brain functionality: Your mind doesn’t passively observe the world; it proactively predicts what it expects to see (or otherwise sense) at every moment. In this example, you were able to spot that blue coffee mug — immediately and effortlessly — because it, and it alone, violated your mind’s prediction of what you expected to see in the room.

Novelty is a function of prediction error, which is also called expectancy violation. The more something violates our expectations, the more surprised we are, and the more novelty we attribute to the source of the violation. Our brains are hard-wired to alert our conscious minds when an expectancy violation occurs. The result of this process is usually a shift of attention toward the novel object.

This process should be of great interest to marketers, because a key purpose of any new package on the shelf or ad spot during prime-time TV is to draw people’s attention and stand out against the background clutter. But there is also a downside to novelty: It isn’t automatically associated with positive emotional response. On the contrary, the brain tends to approach novelty with caution. A byproduct of attention is vigilance, because something new and unknown may be dangerous or harmful. So, our attraction to novelty comes with a bit of a paradox attached: We’re drawn to novelty because we can learn from it, but we don’t usually like it until it becomes less novel.

Marketers often see this effect when they introduce consumers to new products or packaging designs. More often than not, they find that the alternative rated most “new and different” is also rated the least liked.

In evolutionary terms, our attraction to novelty has helped us survive because it enables us to learn new things and reduce risk and uncertainty in our lives. As we learn more about novel things in our environment, our orientation toward them changes. They become less novel, and we pass from the attraction of novelty to the comfort of familiarity.

Comforting us with familiarity

Familiarity is one of the most powerful drivers of consumer behavior. And like our attraction to novelty, our attraction to familiarity has deep evolutionary roots. Although novelty alerts us to opportunities for learning, familiarity gives us a feeling of comfort with what we’ve learned. When something is familiar, we can allocate much less mental effort toward it. We acquire an increased sense of certainty without expending a lot of additional mental energy. This is clearly a good deal for our cognitive miser brains.

Familiarity is important for market researchers because it’s a major source of brand and product preferences. Because consumers are cognitive misers, they often make buying decisions using lazy control instead of explicit deliberation. Familiarity thus becomes a heuristic (decision-making shortcut) that helps them narrow down their choice options and make a final selection. Along with price, brand familiarity is the most commonly cited factor in consumer decisions.

Social psychologists have discovered that familiarity itself breeds positive feelings, independent of the characteristics of the item in question. Through a mental process called the mere exposure effect, repeated exposure to an object tends to increase liking for it, whatever it is, even if we have no other reason to like it. Scientists speculate that this automatic connection between familiarity and liking is the main reason familiarity is so strongly related to consumer preferences.

Studies also show that consumers are generally unaware of the mere exposure effect and are quite willing to attribute — or more correctly misattribute — their positive feelings toward a familiar brand to its inherent qualities. This is one of the many biases that distort the accuracy of consumers’ expressed opinions about their brand and product preferences (see Chapter 15).

Understanding the power of familiarity and the mere exposure effect has at least three big implications for marketing, advertising, and consumer behavior:

Familiarity is a key element of brand equity, accounting for much of the marketplace advantage of leading brands (see Chapter 9).

Mere exposure provides a mechanism for getting a product or brand from novel to familiar. Many marketing tactics, such as free samples or “introductory offers,” have the effect of increasing exposure to new products, which marketers hope will translate into familiarity, liking, and repeat purchases (see Chapter 10).

Mere exposure goes a long way toward explaining why advertising works, even when people swear that they aren’t influenced by advertising at all (see Chapter 11).

Of course, there are limits to the positive emotional impact of familiarity, because liking does not increase with repetition forever. At some point, repetition becomes irritating or simply boring, switching emotional associations from positive to negative. As with novelty, too much familiarity can trigger avoidance rather than approach.

A key problem for marketers is determining when and where these switching points occur.

Keeping things simple with processing fluency

Processing fluency refers to the ease with which an object or situation can be interpreted and understood by the brain. It impacts our ability to form impressions and determine meaning and value. Like familiarity, processing fluency tends to increase positive feelings, but it does so using a different mechanism. Familiarity creates liking through frequency of exposure, while processing fluency does so through ease of processing.

Numerous experiments have shown that processing fluency can have powerful effects on people’s judgments and decisions, many of which are extremely relevant for marketing and market research:

Familiarity and liking: Ironically, when something has high processing fluency, it can appear to be more familiar even if it is not, causing people to feel more positively toward it than if it were less easy to process.

Truth: Arguments and statements that are easy to read are more likely to be seen as true. Factual statements presented in easy-to-read colors are judged to be true more often than when presented in hard-to-read colors. Folk sayings presented as rhymes are rated as more truthful than those that don’t rhyme.

Beauty: Faces that are more symmetrical are seen as more attractive. Objects that have more symmetry, more contrast between foreground and background, and more predictable patterns are rated as more aesthetically pleasing.

Risk: New initial public offering (IPO) companies that have pronounceable stock symbols (for example, KAR) perform better in their first six months than companies with unpronounceable symbols (for example, XXY). Amusement park rides with hard-to-pronounce names are rated as more exciting and adventurous than rides with easy-to-pronounce names. Food additives with hard-to-pronounce names are seen as more harmful than additives with easy-to-pronounce names.

Scrutiny and learning: Easy-to-process materials are less likely to be carefully scrutinized. Conversely, disfluency triggers more scrutiny, more attention to detail, and better memory retention. Students who read lessons in hard-to-read fonts achieved higher test scores than students who read the same lessons in easier-to-read fonts (see Chapter 22).

As with the effects of familiarity and repetition on liking, these misattribution effects of processing fluency tend to go unrecognized because they occur nonconsciously. Interestingly, when they’re explained to people, the effects tend to go away. So, we’re capable of discounting processing fluency effects, but we need to be aware of them in order to do so. And it’s probably true that neither marketers nor consumers are aware of many of these effects and their inadvertent impacts on consumer judgments, decisions, and behavior.

Some obvious neuromarketing tips follow from these examples of processing fluency:

If you want to give your customers a good head start toward liking your new product, give it an easy-to-pronounce name.

When presenting your product in a new ad, keep it simple and remember that the fluency or disfluency of how you talk about your product may transfer to the product itself.

When presenting product information in marketing communications, format and display your message in a way that facilitates easy processing — short sentences, lots of white space, graphical illustrations, and so on.

For policy makers and regulators, pay attention to fluency effects when communicating to consumers about potential hazards. Be aware that a hazardous product may be perceived as safe simply because it has an easy-to-pronounce name.

The Nonconscious Mind Anchors Us in the Moment

Nonconscious thought processes used to be dismissed as simple and relatively dumb. Today, modern brain science is revealing that these processes play a much more active role in many of the mental capabilities we prize as uniquely human, including creativity, learning, language, and achieving our goals and plans.

The survival value of nonconscious thinking

Until recently in the history and philosophy of science, mental activity was considered to be predominantly conscious in nature, with nonconscious processes seen mostly as intermittent sources of disruption or irrationality, as in the Freudian tradition of the unruly and dangerous unconscious. But today, brain scientists are slowly displacing the conscious mind with the nonconscious mind as the center of human mental activity. This shift is as important, and as profound, as the shift in astronomy from the earth-centered to the sun-centered solar system.

This emerging perspective is largely driven by a greater appreciation of the evolutionary origins and adaptive value of the nonconscious. Brain activities below the level of conscious awareness are now seen as a complex behavioral guidance system that evolved to help us stay safe and function efficiently in the current moment without having to invest too much cognitive effort in doing so.

This guidance system is made up of four separate mental systems that can be directly and nonconsciously activated by changes in our environment and then trigger behavior, without conscious intervention:

Perceptual: Guides how we take in impressions and orient our attention and our bodies in the physical world

Evaluative: Guides approach and avoidance behavior based on automatic evaluations that occur as part of interpreting and understanding a situation

Motivational: Guides nonconscious goal pursuit and achievement via the nonconscious activation of goals in response to external events

Emotional: Guides the nonconscious activation of goals and motivational states via the nonconscious influence of emotional states such as moods and positive or negative reactions

Together, these nonconscious systems form the foundation of our day-to-day behavior and our orientation to whatever current situation we find ourselves in. They’re highly adaptive and flexible — they served us well when we were living in small bands and sleeping in the trees, and they continue to serve us well in the modern world, including the increasingly complex world of shopping, buying, and using commercial products.

Why we’re not conscious of our nonconscious

The human brain can be thought of as a series of layers, like a multistory apartment building, constructed over millions of years, one layer on top of another. The lowest layer takes care of basic housekeeping functions, like maintaining our body temperatures and keeping our hearts beating. This is our so-called reptilian brain. Above that is the much more recently developed mammalian brain, where many of our nonconscious, automatic processes reside. These processes were selected and preserved by evolution for survival value long before consciousness was invented, and have been inherited by us. The top layer is the most recent addition, the unique human brain, where our conscious, self-reflective minds are located. Although some parts of the brain are older than others, it’s important to remember that they all continue to evolve together, so they shouldn’t be thought of literally as old brain versus new brain.

The basic reason we aren’t conscious of our nonconscious is because of this architecture of our brains. The conscious brain is densely connected to the outside world, through all our senses, but is much more weakly connected to the inside world of our lower-level mammalian and reptilian brains. It’s kind of like having a direct elevator to the penthouse suite — you have great views, but you never have a chance to run into your neighbors who live on the lower floors.

Thinking functionally, you can easily see why this arrangement has evolved in this way. The great advantage of our conscious minds is the ability to remember and learn from the past and apply what we’ve learned to plan for the future. We would be much less effective at doing this if we had to devote most of our conscious attention to managing all the minutiae of orienting ourselves in the present. So, our nonconscious minds take over much of this work for us. Our nonconscious anchors us in the moment, keeping us (for the most part) safe and functioning, so we can use our conscious minds for more important things, like learning and planning.

How we make decisions without thinking about them

The conscious brain is optimized for learning and planning, not making decisions. This conclusion may come as a shock to many economists and marketers, but this is the great lesson of the field of behavioral economics. We don’t use our conscious brains to make decisions unless we’re forced to do so. This is perhaps the most important implication of the cognitive efficiency principle: Our brains are cognitive misers, and making decisions expends a lot of cognitive “currency,” so our brains avoid conscious decisions when they can.

As we show in this chapter, humans have developed many nonconscious tactics for aiding cognitive efficiency, such as relying on lazy control, novelty, familiarity, and processing fluency. When applied to the problem of making choices, these shortcuts allow us to turn potentially exhausting decisions into fast and simple reactions.

People have developed many terms for describing these “quick and dirty” decisions: snap judgments, hunches, gut reactions, blink responses. But they all share one key attribute: They substitute an internal survey of feelings for a more cognitively demanding consideration of external facts.

The role of feelings and emotions in consumer behavior is so important that we devote a full chapter to it (Chapter 6). For now, we simply note that we make decisions without thinking about them by reading emotional signals — very basic approach or avoidance signals — that are built directly into our nervous systems by our past personal experiences or, in some cases, by evolutionary inheritance. This process happens so quickly and at such a low level in our brains that we’re very seldom aware of it.

The priming directive: Influence without awareness

This discussion of nonconscious influences having a direct impact on behavior begs an important question: If external factors can influence our behavior directly, without passing through our conscious mind, then how do they do that? By what alternative mechanism do they accomplish this almost magical effect? The mechanism that accomplishes this task is called priming, and the drivers of priming are called primes.

Priming is a nonconscious brain process. It occurs quickly, automatically, and effortlessly. The mental process within which it works is called associative activation. This process is well known to psychologists and describes how exposure to one idea in our minds automatically activates other, associated ideas, which then can trigger physical responses in our bodies and, ultimately, complex behaviors like words and actions. For example, seeing a pizza ad on TV may prime eating, and you may find yourself getting a bowl of cereal at the next ad break. That’s priming.

Associative activation depends on a built-in propensity in our minds to imagine any pair of events that occur sequentially as a cause and its effect. This is not a logical evaluation; it’s a way of preparing our bodies for possible action. Associative activation occurs by amplifying any connections we find in our long-term memories that can possibly relate to the presumed connections we’ve imagined. These connections, in turn, amplify other connections in a cascading sequence that quickly results in large areas of memory being made ready to help understand and respond to the imagined cause-and-effect relationship. All this occurs long before our conscious minds can apply deliberative, logical reasoning to the situation.

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Priming is a byproduct of associative activation. When one idea activates another, we say that the first primed the second. When a behavior results from an activation sequence, we say the behavior was primed by the idea that initiated the sequence. The resulting priming effect is a measure of the strength of association between one idea (the prime) and another idea or action (the primed effect). By measuring priming effects, brain scientists and neuromarketers can peer, if only indirectly, into the invisible world of mental associations and automatic behavioral responses.

Research on priming has exploded over the last decade and has yielded many intriguing examples of influence without awareness that are relevant to marketing and consumer behavior. For instance:

A backpack placed unobtrusively in a room can prime cooperative behavior, while a briefcase can prime competitive behavior.

Candy bars can prime pleasure-seeking behaviors that have nothing to do with eating candy.

Solving puzzles that contain words relating to old age can prime walking more slowly after completing the test.

Money (for example, a dollar bill left casually on a table) can prime greedy behavior.

Barely detectable scents of cleaning products can prime hand washing.

Invoking a significant other (say, a demanding father) can prime goals and behaviors associated with that person (such as greater effort in a problem-solving task).

Exposure to a brand can prime behaviors associated with that brand (for example, exposure to an Apple logo primed people to be more creative in a creativity test).

From the neuromarketing perspective, ads are primes that are supposed to influence buying behavior later on. Displays in stores and images on packages are primes that are supposed to influence immediate choice in a shopping situation. Brands are primes that are supposed to associate inanimate products and companies with our deepest personal aspirations and goals.

For neuromarketers, priming is the key mechanism, deeply rooted in the brain sciences, by which marketing in all its forms (ads, displays, promotions, discounts, celebrity endorsements, even naming ballparks) impacts consumer attitudes and buying behavior.

How priming works

Priming research has identified two very different ways that priming works:

Associative priming: A passive cognitive connection between a prime and a primed effect, such as walking slowly after being exposed to words about old age. Associative priming effects tend to be short-lived, be relatively weak, decrease in power over time, and be easily interrupted.

Motivational priming: An active triggering of a goal that then influences behavior. Goal-based priming effects, whether initiated consciously or nonconsciously, tend to grow stronger over time, persist through obstacles, and decrease quickly when the goal is satisfied. Motivational priming begins with associative priming, but then triggers goals as well as associations.

Marketers and neuromarketers are mostly interested in the second type of priming. For more details on this topic, see our discussion of motivation, goals, and consumer behavior in Chapter 7. For a deeper dive into associative priming, see the discussion of response-time studies in Chapter 17.

Why priming doesn’t turn us into zombie consumers

Let’s be honest. The idea of influence without awareness, of primes impacting our behavior without our knowing it, makes most people feel a little queasy. We feel vulnerable and defenseless, at the mercy of wily marketers who can trigger associations in our minds that we’re powerless to resist. This theme has been the subject of more than a few popular-press articles decrying the threat posed by neuromarketing, warning against the imminent discovery of a “buy button” in our brains that, when pressed, will turn us all into “zombie consumers,” unable to resist the marketer’s siren song.

In fact, priming research has revealed that people aren’t nearly as helpless as they might appear. Several findings show that the priming mechanism is actually very resistant to unwanted manipulation. It may even provide nonconscious defenses that make it harder, not easier, for marketers to reach and persuade consumers with their marketing messages.

Research has shown that two conditions need to be in place for motivational, goal-based priming to work:

Current-state to goal-state gap: The person being exposed to the prime must be experiencing a gap between how he feels at the moment and the goal being primed. For example, if someone is trying to lose ten pounds, he’ll be susceptible to priming that will trigger behavior that moves him toward that goal. But if another person has just met her goal to lose ten pounds, those primes will have no impact on her.

Positive feelings toward the goal: The goal must be something the person feels positively about. People can’t be primed to do things they don’t want to do. If someone doesn’t want to start smoking, priming with the Marlboro Man is not going to make him or her do so. Priming does not create goals; it only orients behavior toward goals that already exist.

The existence of these conditional effects reinforces the idea that priming is an adaptive mechanism. If it worked against our survival chances, it would’ve been deselected by evolution a long time ago. It exists today because, on the whole, it works for us, not against us.

There is another aspect of priming that marketers might view with some alarm. In a recent study of the priming effects of brand names and slogans, researchers led by Juliano Laran discovered the existence of reverse priming effects (that is, priming in the opposite direction from what was expected). The researchers found that priming with retail brand names associated with thriftiness, such as Walmart or Kmart, led to lower estimates of how much a person would spend in an upcoming shopping trip, while priming with retail brand names associated with high-end shopping, like Nordstrom or Tiffany, led to higher spending estimates. This was as expected. However, when the same test was conducted with the slogans of these retail stores, they found a reverse priming effect. Now the thrifty store slogans primed higher shopping trip spending estimates, and expensive store slogans primed lower shopping trip estimates.

The explanation, which the researchers confirmed with several other experiments, was that the slogans were perceived by the participants as persuasion attempts, in a way that the brand names were not. This perception primed a goal in the participants that the researchers did not intend, to correct against persuasion. The participants then satisfied that goal by predicting more spending after seeing the thrifty store slogans and less spending after seeing the expensive store slogans. All this occurred at a nonconscious level. The participants were completely unaware that the slogans had triggered this correction goal, or that they had satisfied that goal in the way in which they performed the shopping estimation task.

This is just one example from a growing literature on correction goals that has much significance for marketing. Given what we’ve learned in this chapter about the brain’s resistance to deep thinking in general, we shouldn’t be too surprised that our marketing-bombarded brains have developed some built-in, automatic defenses against persuasion, which, after all, requires some serious cognitive attention to do its job. Creating zombie consumers is not as easy as a casual acquaintance with priming might suggest.

We don’t want to jump to the opposite extreme and say that this means all marketing is futile, but we do believe it provides good evidence that the intuitive consumer is not defenseless when it comes to processing and reacting to marketing primes. Nonconscious processes don’t necessarily work against us just because we aren’t aware of them.

So, What Is Consciousness Good for, Anyway?

If the nonconscious mind is such a great evaluator, decision maker, and behavior influencer, another question immediately arises: What, then, is the conscious mind good for?

Taking over from the nonconscious when necessary

Consciousness — or more specifically self-consciousness — gives humans an incredible advantage over all other species on the planet. It gives us the capacity to think about our own thinking, observe our own behavior, draw conclusions, and make plans for the future based on that knowledge.

Nonconscious thinking works best in routine situations. As long as things don’t change too drastically, automatic, effortless processes can be amazingly efficient. But when you confront something new or completely unexpected, your conscious mind will almost always take over, focusing on the new situation, comparing it to past experience, and planning what to do next.

The conscious mind always has the capacity to interrupt and override nonconscious processing. However, because of the efficiency principle, it does this much less often than you might expect. Most scientists agree that only about 5 percent to 10 percent of our information processing capacity is utilized by conscious thought. The remaining 90 percent to 95 percent is all nonconscious.

One thing conscious thinking can do is make nonconscious effects disappear. Research has documented that effects like priming and processing fluency tend to go away when people are made aware of them. If you’re told that a backpack in the corner can prime you to be more cooperative, for example, the effect will vanish and you’ll no longer be more cooperative when the backpack is in the corner. Our reliance on nonconscious processes is a convenient shortcut to behavior. Our conscious brains are free to override them if we so choose.

For marketers, the issue comes down to this: Sometimes you want to wake up conscious thinking about your product and brand and sometimes you don’t. Knowing when conscious processing works to your advantage and when it doesn’t is something that neuromarketing can help you understand.

Talking to ourselves

We experience our conscious minds primarily as voices in our heads. The voice is almost always talking. Often it breaks into two parts and a person has a dialogue with herself. This ongoing internal conversation is part of what it means to be human. It’s how we come to grips with our world and ourselves. It’s the mechanism by which we deliberately pick apart our past and plan for our future.

Possibly the biggest obstacle to accepting the reality of the nonconscious is the strong sense that conscious thinking, which we experience so vividly, is all the thinking we do. But it’s only all the thinking we’re aware of. We are, in fact, operating with very partial information about ourselves and what influences us. As Leonard Mlodinow says in his excellent book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (Pantheon), our view of ourselves and our motivations is like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

Thinking about the past and the future

What the conscious brain does well, and the nonconscious brain does extremely poorly, is thinking about the past and planning for the future. The ability to deliberate about our situation, compare it to the past, and play out in imagination different possible scenarios for the future, provides a huge survival advantage over simply reacting in a nonconscious way.

Social psychologists call the nonconscious behavioral guidance systems we review is this chapter our default system for guiding behavior, one that existed evolutionarily long before the development of consciousness. Now that we have consciousness, we have another route into these systems, but one that’s unable to probe into their workings because it operates at a different level in the brain than they do. So, although the conscious brain interacts continuously with the nonconscious brain, and is constantly drawing on the outputs of nonconscious processes, it’s unaware that it’s doing so.

The emerging consensus is that the primary role of the nonconscious is to keep us tied to the present, to provide automatic behavioral guidance “nudges” that orient us toward behavior that has a high likelihood of being safe, correct, and appropriate in the situation we find ourselves in. That leaves the conscious brain free to do what it does best, which is to engage in what social psychologist John Bargh calls “time travel” — traveling into the past to remember what we’ve learned and projecting ourselves into the future to plan and anticipate how to achieve the future states we desire for ourselves.

The Three Master Variables of Neuromarketing Research

The conscious and nonconscious processes in our brains work together to help us understand and function successfully in the world around us. Sometimes this remarkable machinery is put to worthy tasks like thinking great thoughts, developing new philosophies, or discovering world-changing scientific theories. But most of the time we use our brains for much more mundane tasks, like remembering to pick up diapers for little Susie down at the Stop & Shop.

The purpose of neuromarketing is to explain how we use the most complex structure in the universe to do things like buy toothpaste. In pursuing this purpose, which ends up being much more interesting than it sounds, neuromarketing comes back again and again to three master variables that represent the three things that marketers care about the most when they want to understand the brains of their consumers.

Attention: Did they notice my ad or product?

Emotion: Do they like it?

Memory: Will they remember it?

These are the three key cognitive processes that neuromarketing is devoted to understanding in the context of consumer behavior. Each has conscious and nonconscious components. We close this chapter by briefly reviewing how these three processes relate to the topics we discuss in previous sections.

Attention: The doorway to conscious awareness

You can’t pay attention to something without being aware that you’re paying attention to it. So, attention is a conscious phenomenon. But something needs to happen in your brain to cause you to focus attention or shift your attention from one object to another. These pre-attentive processes may be either conscious or nonconscious.

You can shift attention voluntarily, as when you actively search for a friend’s face in a crowded room. This is called top-down attention. Or you can have your attention automatically shifted for you by your environment, as when you hear your name spoken across a room. That is called bottom-up attention.

Attention is deeply involved in novelty detection. Surprise is the basic mechanism of attention shifting, and we’re naturally predisposed to direct conscious attention to things and situations that our brains consider novel.

Our ability to focus attention is extremely limited. Engaging in concentrated attention is one of the hardest things for our brains to do. Attention expends a lot of cognitive effort, so our cognitive miser brains use it sparingly.

For marketers, attention isn’t always a good thing. When you want consumers to experience something new — like a new product, package, or ad — you want to trigger attention. But familiarity-liking and processing-fluency effects disappear when attention is aimed at them.

Attention is important to new products and brands. It’s an important variable in the online world, because online experience is active and task oriented, not passive like watching TV. Attention may be a negative factor in advertising, because it has been shown to trigger counter-arguing, which may diminish the effectiveness of ads. Attention is a variable to be manipulated in entertainment: Misdirection is a key element of narrative surprise, as well as in illusions and magic.

In all these contexts, attention is an ingredient that needs to be measured. Neuromarketing provides several ways to measure it (see Chapter 16).

Emotion: Arousal, attraction, motivation

Emotion is extremely important to all aspects of marketing and consumer behavior. Traditionally, market researchers have tried to measure feelings, which are our conscious emotional experiences. But nonconscious emotional reactions like approach-avoidance responses and micro-valences (subtle emotional cues associated with everything we experience and store in memory) may play a larger role in consumer behavior.

Emotion is usually classified along three dimensions, which we cover at length in Chapters 6 and 7):

Valence: The direction of emotion, measured from positive to negative

Arousal: The intensity of emotion, measured from low to high

Motivation: The action orientation of emotion, measured from approach to avoidance

Emotion is an end product of both familiarity and processing fluency. Things that feel familiar or are easy to process tend to be more liked. These associations are often misattributions. We mistake our response to the form or context of the object with its inherent qualities. But these responses are common and very relevant to marketing.

Emotional connection is very important to the idea of loyalty, both to brands and products. It’s earned through product usage, experience, and social validation. Emotion is also important to responses to the many forms of online social media. Searching for information on Google is primarily a cognitive activity, but keeping track of friends on Facebook is an emotionally complex form of social interaction.

The importance of emotion as an explanatory variable or as an outcome variable differs from consumer context to consumer context. Neuromarketers have developed several methods for measuring emotional response directly, as it occurs, instead of asking people to rate it after the fact.

Memory: How we construct, retrieve, and reconstruct the past

Memory is the most complex of the three master variables of neuromarketing. It has both input and output functions that are critically important to marketing. On the input side, we encode or store memories. On the output side, we retrieve or remember memories.

Marketers are interested in both these aspects of memory. Each has a conscious and nonconscious component. Conscious encoding is the familiar process of explicit learning or memorization. But there is also an implicit form of memory encoding that is nonconscious and effortless. Implicit learning happens in the absence of memorization, and it plays a big role in how marketing messages work.

On the retrieval side, we’re all familiar with conscious recall, which is the voluntary retrieval of a memory. But equally important in the marketing context is recognition, which is a bottom-up form of memory retrieval. We may not be able to recall the message of an ad, but we can easily recognize it when we see it.

The important thing that marketers need to understand about memory is that it’s constructed, not passively retrieved. A memory is not like a video recording that we “replay” when we remember it. Every time we retrieve a memory, we change it. This means that marketing not only invokes memories, but also literally alters them. Marketers have yet to fully internalize the implications of this startling fact.

Memory is an especially important component of familiarity, and its absence is a cue for surprise and attention. Memory is central to brand equity and to any marketing message that needs to persist over time, like an ad. It’s less important for online marketing, where delay is less an issue.

Neuromarketers have developed metrics for determining whether memory activation is taking place. Because these methods aren’t yet able to discriminate between memory encoding and retrieval processes, there is still a place for traditional methods in measuring memory. Sometimes just asking people what they remember does the trick.