Ten Important Lessons Neuroscience Teaches Marketers

The Ten Important Lessons:

1. Most decision making happens at a subconscious level.
2. This means that ad persuasion can occur without conscious attention.
3. All choice behavior - whether stocks, brands, programs, or who will be your next date - reduces to the same computation in the brain.
4. That computation predicts for each choice the value that would be received relative to the individual’s motivations, versus the effort, cost, risk as a compound factor.
5. What marketers call brand lift or persuasion represents a positive change in perception of the brand in terms of the brand’s perceived instrumentality in satisfying specific motivations.
6. Individuals are only partially aware of their own motivations, and if asked to rank them by importance, the responses are largely noise.
7. The brain signal most predictive of an incremental sale caused by an ad is EEG synchrony, when most audience brains take on a single synchronized pattern.
8. The signal most predictive of EEG synchrony is RMT Resonance, the degree of overlap between the ad and its media context in terms of 265 empirically derived Value Signals (words related to motivations).
9. Three other EEG metrics - attention, memory encoding, and emotional approach - are less predictive of EEG synchrony than RMT Resonance.
10. Eye tracking is also less predictive of EEG synchrony.

It takes time for lessons like these to permeate practitioners’ consciousness.

In designing the best ads, marketers will eventually rely upon finding out the motivations of the target group. In fact, they will decide on the target group based on their judgment as to which motivations would be credible if the brand made overt or subtle claims about being able to satisfy such motivations.

Motivations are the mainspring of choice behavior. The perception of brands in relation to satisfying those motivations is a key derivative.

The rational layer is rarely in control of the choice made by the consumer (see the first lesson above). This realization launched a new field called behavioral economics, although P.T. Barnum knew it about a century earlier. Behavioral economics launched a new field called neuroeconomics, which taught us the ten lessons above. The first six lessons can be found in Neuroeconomics Second Edition, and the last four lessons can be found in the 2024-2025 work of Wharton Neuroscience with FOX and Bill Harvey Consulting. Wharton’s Dr. Michael Platt, one of the founders of neuroeconomics, is connected with all ten lessons.

Deeper down inside are the life motivations which pertain across all product categories. That’s where the decisions mostly happen.

Abraham Maslow intuited six of those life motivations, and another nine were discovered by RMT, a company I co-founded.

Advertising can work in more than one way. Changing the perception of the brand’s ability to reward the user in ways relevant to their life motivations is the main method. About 20 years ago my company Next Century Media, working with Andrew Susman, the originator of branded content, discovered that brand lift can be achieved by creating gratitude among users for sponsoring content which served to fulfil some of their life motivations, even though there was no change in brand perceptions.

Back in the 20^th Century, before that discovery, I had a hunch that TV spots could be made more effective by becoming sponsored mini-programs. I called these QOL ads, meaning Quality Of Life. I pictured that many of them would tell inspiring stories in 30 seconds with a brand logo bug indicating who sponsored it. Others might not be inspiring but could be entertaining or informative. YouTube has come up with a very similar art form by inviting the public to become creators, an idea that obsessed me since the 70s.

There is still an opportunity for advertisers to do QOL spots on video of all kinds. Now that social causes are no longer the thing to do in ads, but well-meaning advertiser folk still want to be prosocial, QOL spots could provide the venue. The motivations of the prospects would be researched and the creative would be aimed at relevancy to the motivations of the prospects.

In Canada, this is just starting to be done. Vividata, the MRI of Canada, has made the RMT Drivers part of the standard subscription package. I bet this will be happening in 40 countries before the 20s are over. I see Josh Chasin making this happen. Now that he is in the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and an ARF Erwin Ephron Demystifier, he will be unstoppable.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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