The Power of Emotion: Psychology in Buying & Branding

We Are Not Logical

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Noble Prize in economics for showing that humans don’t make logical decisions, especially in the face of complex judgments. It was a shocking choice for the award, considering Kahneman is not an economist but a psychologist.

Additionally, modern economic theory was primarily built on the assumption that humans are rational. As it turns out, we are not. And this relates to the critical shift that must happen in B2B marketing.

We cannot simply present complex information in a stack of logical bullet points and expect to win the day. Why? Because decision-making doesn’t happen in the part of the brain that manages logic. It actually happens in the limbic brain, which is responsible for emotion.

The limbic system is a collective term for brain structures that are involved in processing emotions, and it’s responsible for all human behavior and decision-making and has no capacity for language. On top of that, this system processes information two hundred times faster than the cognitive brain!

In other words, when we communicate merely the features, facts, and figures of a product, it doesn’t catalyze action. This type of information only provides rationale for the decisions we have already made in the subconscious.

Scientists have found that brain-damaged patients who have lost their capacity to feel emotion struggle to make even the most elementary decisions.

If you’re like most of my clients, this just made you uncomfortable.

Good. Do you want to know why your current marketing isn’t working? Because you are not tapping into the most important tool in your marketing and in your humanity: your ability to create an emotional response in another person.

Let’s think for a moment about what the brain is responsible for every day. The brain is responsible for keeping us alive; coordinating the body’s systems; and translating impulses into movement, speech, thought, ideation, action, and emotions.

It’s responsible for subconscious processing, memory, learning, change, decision-making, and so much more. Thus, a key function of the brain is to protect itself from overload and to pay attention to the right things, and it has a number of ways of doing this.

The brain is remarkable at preventing overload because it is a remarkable filter. Every second, we are bombarded by information. The human body sends eleven million bits of information per second to the brain for processing, and the conscious mind processes fifty bits of information per second.

This filtering mechanism allows us to have a conversation in a crowded restaurant, drive a car, and pick up on peripheral danger signals.

The brain is built to focus on the things of most importance and interest to us.

The key part of the brain that focuses attention is the reticular activating system (RAS). RAS is best known as a filter because it distinguishes between important information that requires attention and unimportant information that can be ignored.

As Ruben Gonzalez explains in The Courage to Succeed, “Even though the cerebrum is the center of thought, it will not respond to a message unless the RAS allows it.”

So what does the RAS let into the conscious mind? Ironically, only things that are already important. The RAS helps you decide what is important. For example, if you’re considering buying a red Audi for the first time, all of a sudden, you will notice more red Audis than you ever knew existed.

You will not notice black BMWs, yellow Volkswagens, or white Porsches. The RAS is also the part of the brain that recognizes your baby’s cry or identifies danger. In short, the brain predecides what to pay attention to based on a combination of past experiences, life influences, desires, and one’s current emotional state.

This insight puts a new twist on what you’re actually competing against.

Think about that for a moment: your message must contend for attention along with eleven million other bits of information per second. When you consider the three exchanges in the sales cycle, you are fighting for prioritization in your customer’s mind.

This means you’re not just competing with your named customers. In the world of marketing and getting attention, you’re literally competing with everything else your buyers see, think, and feel.

You’re competing with their spouses; their kids; the vacation planning to Disney World; the Bud Light they want after work; their email overload; and all the other wants, needs, problems, and interests they have.

And either your marketing message will trigger a predisposition for a buyer to pay attention to you, or it won’t.

Again, this is why it’s so critical to know your buyer personas. If you don’t know who they are inside their heads, you won’t get in. This all happens in the subconscious and is related to getting people to know your name—that you even exist. This is what’s happening in the attention exchange.

The critical truth is that emotion drives decisions.

Building your buyer personas will help you understand emotional buying motivations and how people’s lives feel. Sales mapping helps you empathize with the emotion of the buyer’s journey. Messaging choreography begins with emotion, validates, and gently leads them to a confident decision. Branding captures the emotion of your relationship to your customers.

It is time for those in the B2B world to stop sabotaging their own efforts because they aren’t comfortable with emotion.