Early last year I was introduced to a fascinating book called "Your Brain is Almost Perfect," by Read Montague, a neuroscientist now at Virginia Tech (previously head of the Baylor Neuroimaging lab). Dr. Montague is a leader in the field of
computational neuroscience: the study of how information processing is supported by our brain. In his book, Dr. Montague argues that choice is not about choice, but about value. Humans don't have the luxury of a limitless energy supply; valuing arose because our choices need to be efficient. Evolution is not kind to creatures that are energetically wasteful. I suggest you read
The Brain is Almost Perfect, it's a wonderful book that one cannot explain in a few sentences.
I decided to take Dr. Montague argument to consumer-decision making, particularly to brands. I see a brand as model that predicts a future reward. The more efficient the model, the easier it is for the brain to to compute the brands return. In other words, a brands success depends on how much energy it takes the consumer to engage with it. A successful brand should be intuitive. It needs to act like a heuristic; bypassing the cognitive costs involved with choice. I've pasted the entire Efficient Brand paper below this post.
This blog is dedicated to exploring this idea deeper.
Efficient Brain seeks Efficient Brand
We all know our decisions are the end product of our thoughts. Yet sometimes we find it hard to take our thoughts and turn them into a decision. Today, with the ubiquity of options, the chasm separating thought and decision is widening. Brands, with their many product options, have made the concept of choice more ideal than the actual act of choosing, making choosing hard work. The success of a brand today may have less to do with what it can provide in return, and more to do with the amount of energy it takes to choose it.
In the field of computational neuroscience, we see the brain as a computer — i.e., a neural network of interconnected cells — with two components: living tissue (the hardware) and the mind (the software). Just as software is the product of all the interactions of hardware, the mind does not equal the brain; rather, it is epiphenomenal, meaning our thoughts have no material basis but live in a specter state hovering above the three pound mass of grey matter.
However, unlike the computer, the brain has a limited energy source. We are not born with extension cords that can be easily plugged into any socket. As a result, our brains have no choice but to be efficient. They must carefully measure and allocate energy to every computation. And the amount of energy a computation gets is a measure of its value to achieving the overall goal or desired state of being.
How exactly does the brain remain efficient? One area that has seen a lot of study lately is the divide between our conscious and subconscious, or deliberate vs. automatic processing. The difference between the subconscious and conscious is that our subconscious is stealth like — automatic and effortless, requiring minimal energy to operate. The conscious, on the other hand, requires us to deliberate (sometimes painfully) over options. It is energy draining and introduces the possibility of costly mistakes. The brain abhors this energy-zapping mode and as soon as it can it shifts any learned behavior from the conscious to subconscious.
As reported by Jonah Lehrer (in his book titled How We Decide) an experiment by Bradley Hatfield at the University of Maryland that looked at the brain waves of novice vs. expert golfers showed:
“The brain waves of novice athletes exhibit a consistent pattern of activity, with lots of erratic spikes and haphazard rhythms. This is the neural signature of a mind that's humming with conscious thoughts as it pays attention to all sorts of irrelevant stimuli and bodily cues. The minds of experts, in contrast, look strangely serene. When they are performing their sport, they exhibit a rare mental tranquility, as their cortex deliberately ignores interruptions from the outside world. This is evidence, Hatfield says, of ‘the zone’— that trance-like mindset allowing experts to perform at peak levels.”
That unruffled, almost eerie, neurological activity is the experts’ brains in auto-pilot mode. The job of the conscious is to learn and perfect every fragile movement and rotation of the swing. Once those basic mechanics are in place, and the swing is essentially perfected, the brain computes it is no longer efficient to use anymore energy when no more is needed. Auto-pilot mode kicks in, the brain sits back and coasts forward. We can apply this same principle to marketing. It’s possible that consumers enter this tranquil auto-pilot mode when shopping for brands they are familiar with. According to Gerd Gerzinger, at the Max Plank Institute, this is called the recognition heuristic: if one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion. This heuristic is an efficient way for our brain to get to the return. It instinctively knows that the recognized object is the safer option, sidestepping any computational costs involved with making a choice.
The Efficient Brand
Humans are anticipation machines. Future possibilities are more pleasurable than the present. Wolfram Shultz, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, first discovered this while probing dopamine neurons, which are cells involved with pleasure, in the brains of monkeys. He found the monkeys were more excited about predicting rewards than about the delivery of the rewards themselves. The surprise finding was in the surprises themselves; he found that unpredicted rewards are 4x times more pleasurable than expected rewards. Our prediction machinery is efficient method for the brain. The faster and earlier the brain can learn the information, or a pattern, the less energy it will need to expend later. It’s as if the brain cheats by taking a shortcut, rewarding itself before actually receiving the prize, making the decision process easier and quicker, and more instinctual than rational.
Brands, in a sense, act as these shortcuts. As Read Montague says in his book The Brain is Almost Perfect, “Uncertainty long ago put evolutionary pressure on learning mechanisms, and creatures that could effectively reduce their uncertainty through learning survived better than those that couldn’t. So uncertainty was the evolutionary question, and learning (model building) was the answer.” Brands at their best are learned heuristics that help reduce this uncertainty, that make decision making almost effortless. Which is what makes them valuable to consumers and valuable to companies.
So, the stronger, earlier, and more accurately the consumer can predict the return (or reward) of a brand, the less energy a consumer has to invest. An interesting way to think this in the context of brands is that the success of a brand depends on how much energy is required for the brain to compute its return value. The quicker the brain can get to the value of the brand’s return, the better. As marketers, we would do well to think more about the amount of energy it takes a consumer to interact with our brand, rather than (or in addition to) how they interact with our brand. If a brand acts as a model that predicts future returns, then we need to make sure this model is efficient, easy to use, and accurate.
Keeping this notion of how brands can take advantage of how the brain wants to make life easy for itself is one way to make decision-making effortless and rewarding for consumers and successful for the brands we work with. Others, for example, include keeping your message ‘simple enough’ or using heuristics at key times in the decision making process.
