The short answer
Most brand choices are fast and instinctive. At the moment of choice, people reach for the brand that comes to mind first and feels like the obvious answer. That instinct comes from the memories and associations attached to the brand over years, most of them below conscious awareness. People explain the choice afterwards with reasons. So brands grow by building the right associations in memory, not by winning arguments.
Most choices are instinctive
Psychologists describe two ways of thinking: a fast, automatic one and a slow, deliberate one. Daniel Kahneman called them System 1 and System 2. Most buying runs on the fast system. Nobody compares every brand of toothpaste in the aisle. The hand goes to the one that feels right.
Leslie Zane founded Triggers® on this idea in 1995. The first line of her book, The Power of Instinct, is “Human beings are unpersuadable.”
That does not mean people never change. It means arguments are the slow route, and memory is the fast one.
“You can’t convince anybody of anything. But what you can do is build positive associations in the subconscious mind, and those just go in there without the conscious mind confronting them and putting up a blockade.”
People can’t tell you why they choose
Ask people why they bought a brand and they will give you a reason. It will sound sensible, and it is often not the real one. Research has long shown that people have little reliable access to the reasons behind their own choices (Nisbett and Wilson, Psychological Review, 1977).
“If it’s in your subconscious, chances are you don’t even know why you buy the brands you do.”
People make the choice by instinct and explain it afterwards. This is why surveys so often mislead, and why we study memory instead. See what brand tracking misses.
A brand is a network of memories
Every brand you know is stored as a web of connected memories: how it looks, tastes and sounds, where you first met it, who used it, how it made you feel. Some go back to childhood. Each new ad, pack, visit or conversation adds to the web or weakens it.
“A brand is known by the associations it keeps.”
We call this web the Brand Connectome®: a detailed map of the network of memories and associations about your brand in the consumer’s brain. Its strength decides choice. A brand with the right connections comes to mind first and feels like the obvious answer. A brand with weak or negative connections can be well known and still be passed over.
“Triggers® maps brands’ connections in people’s memories, unlocking the ability to shape brand perceptions more rapidly and accelerate business growth.”
Triggers: the cognitive shortcuts behind brand choice
The mind saves effort with cognitive shortcuts. Instead of thinking a choice through, it reacts to a cue it already knows: a color, a shape, a sound, a word, a familiar scene. Each cue carries a story the mind has already learned, so it works in an instant.
We call ourselves Triggers because triggers are the cognitive shortcuts that shape brand choice.
“Triggers are different because they cue the mind, and the mind has a story about the trigger already baked in there.”
This is why persuasion is slow and triggers are fast. An argument has to get past the conscious mind. A trigger links the brand to something the mind already believes.
Awareness is not salience
Most brands measure awareness: do people know the name? Knowing a name is only the start. Salience is how readily the brand comes to mind, and how much it stands out, at the moment someone needs it. Brands are chosen for salience, not for awareness.
“Awareness is that first, just the first seed, knowing the name. For it to be chosen, it needs to become that full-grown tree.”
The seed grows with positive associations, the way a tree grows with water, sun and nutrients. Every relevant memory adds a root. A salient brand stands out in the mind with the right connections, so it wins the moment of choice.
How brands grow
Put these ideas together and you get a simple model of how brands grow. When the brand grows in the mind, it grows in the market. A brand grows in the mind when it gains positive associations, loses negative ones, and reaches more buyers.
Three rules from The Power of Instinct follow from it:
- A hidden network of connections dictates the snap decisions we make.
- Finding new customers accelerates growth. Relying on existing ones is a trap.
- Emotional stories are not enough to drive trial and long-term brand loyalty.
The last rule surprises people. Emotion matters, but emotional benefits only work when they are rooted in your product experience. A moving story that is not tied to the brand’s own cues builds memories of the story, not of the brand. See 5 ways to fail at emotional marketing.
It is also why we talk about instinctive brand preference rather than loyalty: a positive bias toward a brand, created by a network of memories that have become connected to it over time. Preference built this way can be strengthened, and it can be won from competitors. See when a brand stops growing.
The same brain in every category
People buy on instinct whether the product is soda or a pension.
“Human beings are much more similar than they are different at the subconscious level, and that is not well understood.”
We have applied the same method in more than 70 categories, from packaged goods to pharma to financial services. In pharma and health care, associations shape which brands come to mind. They never replace the evidence on efficacy and safety.
Read and watch more
- The Power of Instinct: Leslie Zane’s book on the new rules of persuasion in business and life.
- Cracking the Code on Brand Growth: Knowledge@Wharton on the Brand Connectome®.
- The Hidden Link Between Success and the Subconscious: Leslie Zane’s TEDx talk.
- Videos: short talks on instinctive brand preference and applied behavioral science.
