Introduction to the Psychology of Why People Buy
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 572 of the Brainy Business, understanding the psychology of why people buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Dr. Matt Johnson, co-author of Blindsight. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Have you ever stopped to think about how much of what you experience isn’t just about the product itself, but about what you expected before you ever tried it? Because that question matters more than a lot of brands realize. In a world where people are constantly reacting, posting, reviewing, remixing, and reshaping what brands mean in real time, understanding perception is incredibly important.
The story people tell themselves about your brand changes what they notice, what they feel, what they remember, and even how they experience the thing you sell. That was true when this conversation first aired back in July of 2021, and it might be even more important now, which is why I chose to refresh it for you today. I’m excited to introduce you to Dr. Matt Johnson. Matt is a researcher, writer, and consultant who earned his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Princeton.
He’s written a couple of fantastic books and shared them with us here on the podcast a couple of times. He also has a great TEDx talk on creating your own serendipity using marketing psychology, was in the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2023, and has a great newsletter called Of Brains and Brands on LinkedIn. This conversation is from the first time I had Matt on the show discussing insights around the book he co-authored called Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains.
In this conversation, we talk about how brands influence perception, why expectations can change experience, when consistency matters, when surprise works, and how stories give products meaning beyond their functional features. As you listen, keep this question in mind: Are you shaping expectations for your brand intentionally or leaving other people to do it for you? Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/572. Now let’s jump right in.
Bridging Neuroscience and Marketing
Melina Palmer: Dr. Matt Johnson, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.
Matt Johnson: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, I’m super excited to chat with you today. You know, in all fairness, we’ve been sitting and chatting for like 20 minutes, but like, for the audience’s sake, it was like, I guess we should turn on the actual recording now and get going.
Matt Johnson: True. Get serious from here on out.
Melina Palmer: Well, maybe, I guess if we have to. But we can still have fun. Well, I would love—just tell the world a little bit about who you are and your background and how you got into the behavioral sciences.
Matt Johnson: Yeah. So my name is Dr. Matt Johnson. My original academic background is in neuroscience. My PhD was in cognitive neuroscience. For me, I’ve always been driven by sort of a curiosity about why we do what we do. Humans are these incredibly contradictory, complex, complicated, sometimes hypocritical creatures. We’re sort of endlessly fascinating. And my real focus from an academic standpoint was trying to sort of unpack this.
So I used a lot of neuroimaging technologies. I used a lot of fMRI, which allows you to eavesdrop on the brain as certain processes are unfolding. My specialization was really in the neuroscience of language learning and in sort of learning more generally. Sort of how we go from discrete exemplars to sort of understanding abstract principles of knowledge about the world. And then I finished my PhD work, I went into business consulting for a few years.
And this is really where I saw the rich connections and I think under-explored connections between neuroscience and business and in particular neuroscience and marketing. It was also around that time I started talking with a lot of marketers and we sort of came to this general consensus that really what we’re most interested in from the perspective of neuroscience and what we’re most interested in from the perspective of marketing are really fundamentally the same thing.
We’re sort of driven to understand why we do the things we do and trying to understand and predict human behavior. Neuroscientists sort of do it from the perspective of truth. You sort of want to get to some of the core ideas, however nuanced, however myopic, you want to get to truth. Whereas in marketing you really want to get to actionable decisions. You have a general hypothesis about what’s going on in terms of a customer journey or a consumer experience, etc., and you just want enough data where you can sort of test one thing over the other.
But really generally speaking, we’re talking about the same things. And so this is the space I’ve been operating in really for the past five or six years, really trying to understand this deep, and I think pretty underappreciated connection between neuroscience and marketing.
The Shared Vocabulary of Psychology and Branding
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And so with that, where you started talking to the marketers and seeing where the problems were and where you have a complementary side—I, as we kind of talked about, came from the marketing side and then found behavioral economics and was like, “What? This is a thing? This is amazing!” and seeing how it filled in some of my gaps. So I’m guessing I’ve had some similar conversations with people from the other side. But because you were doing business consulting, were you spotting some gaps and then starting to kind of dig or collectively working with marketers? I guess, how did that jump into—and maybe that’s kind of how the book was born—but, how did that all kind of come together?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, so it was sort of a combination of things really. It really came from just sort of talking about our disciplines and really the kind of problems that kept marketers up at night, the kind of questions that kept neuroscientists up and what kept them occupied in their labs and libraries for 15, 16 hours a day are roughly similar.
So if you look at sort of luxury marketing, for example, there’s this huge emphasis on trying to have a social signaling device and having sort of status associated and exclusivity, etc. And then how you align business incentives with that. So obviously you do want to sell, but not too much where the good becomes proliferated to a large extent and then it becomes not exclusive, less valuable, etc. And this sort of idea of a social signaling device has existed within psychology and social psychology for 50 or 60 years, going back to Leon Festinger’s social comparison theories, sort of understanding our true value relative to a social benchmark.
And so really it became sort of a conversation, not so much about what neuroscience can do for marketing, but really: are we just talking about the same things, but we just have a totally different vocabulary to really describe this social phenomena? So whereas luxury marketers would talk about exclusivity, in social psychology, you might talk about social comparison. It’s the same sort of underlying concept, just a totally different vocabulary. And I think really, then from there, it became much more of a conversation about sort of how we can sort of work together, how neuroscience can sort of fill in the gaps. It really came from this sort of shared realization that there’s so much fundamental similarity between the two, just separated by a gulf of vocabulary.
Defining the Relationship Between Mind and Brain
Melina Palmer: Yeah. So it seems perfectly fitting that with your PhD being in language and communication—the neuroscience of it, of course—but being able to have that insider thought of, like, “I think we’re saying the same thing, but just a little bit differently,” and being able to kind of get to that next level.
Matt Johnson: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, this is kind of to nerd out a bit—these are some of the fundamental questions that have really divided the field of psychology and neuroscience. Is the mind more important than the brain? And what is the relationship between mind and brain? How does the brain govern psychology? And really, if we accept the monist position, which is, I think, where the lion’s share of the evidence is, this is the idea that the mind and brain are fundamentally the same entity. They really just differ in terms of the sort of language which is used to describe it.
So we can describe things in terms of psychological faculties. You can say, “I’m hungry,” and you’re describing your own internal psychological state. Or you can say, “I have afferent connectivity and stimulation of certain regions within the anterior hypothalamus,” which is synonymous essentially with our feelings of hunger. We don’t talk in those types of complex language because that doesn’t do anybody any favors in terms of just trying to have a conversation. It’s not accessible language. But, fundamentally we’re describing the same thing. And again, we’re not divided by sort of fundamental entities; we’re just divided in terms of the language we use to describe these things.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, I would see—you touched on it a little as you were saying, like, with the hypothalamus, blah, blah, blah. But when you started and said, like, “are we like mind and brain and they’re different?” I’m guessing there are some listeners that were like, “What? No, that’s the same.” So can you maybe elaborate a bit on the discussion between mind and brain and how they are different? Or the same—like, what are you talking about there in the mind terms about the difference between the mind and the brain?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, so it’s clear that the mind and the brain have a relationship, right? So if we’re interested in our mental lives, we’re interested in psychology. It’s better to look at the brain as opposed to the heart or the kidney. So it’s understood—we understand that consciousness, language, memory, all things we care about from a psychology perspective—the brain is the place to look there.
But it’s not immediately obvious what this relationship is. And in trying to understand this relationship, there’s been these two sort of historical perspectives. One is from René Descartes way back in the day; this is dualism. This idea that the mind and brain are fundamentally different entities. They interact, but they’re totally and completely different. Then this is contrasted by the monist position that essentially says, no, there’s no difference, it’s the same thing. But they just differ in terms of the language we use to describe them.
So the mind is the brain, the brain is the mind. We’re describing psychological things in the mind. We’re describing neuroscientific things when we’re talking about the brain. And so it’s understood essentially at this point that the brain produces the mind. The brain is synonymous with the mind. All of our psychological faculties are ultimately understandable in terms of the underlying neural machinery which makes them possible. And that this is a one-to-one relationship.
And so it’s a matter of complexity in terms of trying to understand the extent to which different constellations of neural activity produce different psychological states. But it’s understood in principle that everything does translate ultimately into neural real estate at the end of the day. And this is the monist perspective that there really is no difference between the two, that they’re fundamentally the same thing.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. All right, well, thank you for having this potentially seemingly little side tangent. As I told you, I like to just see where the conversation goes. And I think that’s something that I’m guessing many of the listeners have not heard—the nuance between mind and brain—even coming up, as for a lot of people I think it is just discussed in a synonymous space. But knowing that those are conversations taking place, I think is important for people to know. So thank you for that.
Matt Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think really the evidence in favor of a dualist position—that there’s some difference between the two and that there’s some sort of transactional space between the two and that you can have psychological states or psychological processes which aren’t grounded in neural activity—really the evidence for that position, I think at this point, is really at a vanishing point. And so there’s all sorts of implications for that from a neuro-philosophy standpoint in terms of free will and determinism and autonomy, all sorts of things. But yeah, I think we’re on pretty firm grounding accepting the monist position at this standpoint.
How Expectations Shape Biological Reality
Melina Palmer: Well, let’s dig into some of your work and some stuff that’s in your book. You were talking about the luxury brands and I really appreciated—there was a quote in the book which I think is really important when we’re looking at the power of a brand. I know you’re talking about Coke versus Pepsi and people have heard and seen those stories quite a bit. But I really like this quote that you say: “If you’re led to deeply believe that your chosen shoe brand makes you a better basketball player, who’s to say that it doesn’t?” So can you talk a little bit about—I think this is getting into all the mind stuff anyway—but to tell a little bit about kind of how that expectation shapes reality and all that? I think it was just really well done in the book.
Matt Johnson: Oh, thank you. No, I think that’s really one of the areas of consumer neuroscience that I’m most fascinated with—the ways in which the consumer world really shapes our belief systems and shapes our associations that we have with given brands and given products, and how these shifts in terms of the actual architecture of our brains can actually change our perception and actually change our experience of reality.
And so this is seen, as you mentioned, with Coke and Pepsi. So the classic Pepsi Challenge—if you think it’s going to be just generic brown fizzy liquid but you’re led to believe it’s Coke, then you’ll actually enjoy it better. So Coke still spends about $10 billion a year on global advertising. They know that everybody knows Coke. But each additional advertisement you see of Coke sort of hammers in that association a little bit tighter. And this changes the actual weights in our temporal lobes which are mapping our actual understanding of Coke.
They’ve done these experiments using fMRI, where they have essentially the Pepsi Challenge, but with functional magnetic resonance imaging we can actually eavesdrop on the brain as this is happening. You can see that not only do people actually enjoy beverages more when they’re led to believe it’s Coke, but you get a different profile of activity in regions which are representing semantic knowledge.
So it’s really no exaggeration to say that each new advertisement you see of Coca-Cola has changed the brain in such a way where it really changes your fundamental conception of what you are consuming. And this fundamentally shifts your experience. And so, as we write about in the book, there really is this gap. There’s this gap between objectivity—the way the world actually is and physical reality—and the way we actually experience it.
And so clearly we all experience the world slightly differently. So this is the subjective world. This gap between objectivity and subjectivity really is the marketer’s playground. This gap really is opportunity. This is where brands have the opportunity to create beliefs which galvanize the brand and galvanize the consumer experience. If you love Coca-Cola, it’s going to taste much better to you than if you don’t love Coca-Cola. If you love Nike shoes, you’re going to be able to play better and act in accordance with the brand image which has been grounded into you via Nike.
There’s been experiments—this is Dan Ariely’s lab—where he’s done experiments with Ray-Ban sunglasses. If you’re led to believe you were given just generic sunglasses, but you’re led to believe they are Ray-Ban, if you’re a fan of Ray-Ban sunglasses, you’ll actually report that it blocks the sun better. And so it fundamentally changes our experience of reality. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why brands and really consumer experiences are just such a fascinating thing to study.
The “Lucky Potion” Effect in Performance Branding
Melina Palmer: Yeah. I was reminded while you were talking—when Katy Milkman was on, we were talking about Harry Potter because we’re both big Harry Potter nerds—but she was saying how Ron is given the Felix Felicis, which is the luck potion, or rather he’s led to believe that he was given it. Harry made it look like he put it in his drink. And then he played amazing in the Quidditch match. Me being the biggest nerd of all time! But he didn’t actually put it in there; he just believed that he had the lucky potion, so he performed as if it was there.
And so in the case of—you know, there might be a question of, like, “Well, is it bad to make people think…?” And in the book, you’re talking about Red Bull, right? “Red Bull gives you wings.” And how the guys would act differently in the bar when they thought they had a vodka Red Bull versus a vodka other drink or cocktail. And so, it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing too, right? So if the shoes, because I believe they’re Nike, they make me play better, which makes me want to have more Nikes, which makes me play better, which makes me keep going… there’s nothing really wrong with that expectation shaping reality.
But it’s something that’s important for brands to know—that you really want to pick what you’re about and what you want to resonate with. Like Coke and happiness, Red Bull gives you wings, Nike helps you to perform better in sports. You need to have that very clear tie and just keep on putting all your $10 billion behind your happiness so that it just keeps reinforcing. There’s a lot of value in saying that same thing over and over again.
Matt Johnson: Absolutely, yes. I mean, via the mere exposure effect, even if you have maximum brand awareness—which, I couldn’t imagine any listener hasn’t heard of Coca-Cola before, or at least even tried Coca-Cola—but despite this fact, Coke is still going to invest heavily in their advertising because with the mere exposure effect, each additional advertisement sort of moves the needle a little bit further in terms of preferences. And the more you prefer something, the more these sort of placebo effects are going to take hold, which adds just tremendous functional value to the brand.
I’d add there as well, especially with the Red Bull example, because they’re such a fascinating brand that has done this sort of association exercise but has scaled this incredibly effectively over the lifetime of the brand. When Red Bull first came on in the early 2000s, they were just literally for extreme sports people. That was their niche audience, that was their target market, and they established product-market fit with that niche. Then once they did that, they expanded to sports in general. They sponsored the New York Red Bulls and they sponsored other extreme sports until they became synonymous with extreme sports.
Then they got into Red Bull Music Festival, and then they expanded the association strategy to now encompass sort of “extreme entertainment.” And then now, even more recently, they’ve expanded into other target markets. They’ve been really popular with schools. They’ve done these interesting campaigns where they’ll sort of do social listening campaigns. They’ll listen in on students that are struggling and really need to pull an all-nighter and they’ll actually just come over and hand-deliver Red Bulls. They want to be for the “extreme student”—be the best you can be.
Now they’ve expanded their advertising reach to also encapsulate working professionals. It’s like, “Go, you have a PowerPoint presentation. Go knock out that PowerPoint presentation. It’ll give you wings for the PowerPoint presentation.” And so they’re basically now speaking to the “extreme person” in each of us. I think it’s just such a brilliant example about how you start with a very narrow association strategy for a very narrow target market and then you expand strategically as you go, still staying very consistent with what is your core adjective and core brand personality. But you do it in a responsible way where you’re tiering this and getting larger and more abstract as you go.
Consistency and the Power of the “Target Red”
Melina Palmer: Yeah, when you were talking, it’s very reminiscent of an episode I did on the network effect and talking about Facebook. If Facebook had tried to just be the platform for everyone in the entire world, it would have fizzled very quickly because you can’t get the network. You need to start small, and they started at Harvard, and then, and then, and then… and you expand your way out. Same thing. If Red Bull was trying to be like, “We’re extreme,” it doesn’t mean anything.
But you had someone do all these crazy stunts and they’ve worked their way up where you get that snowball level, and then you can slowly work your way out and build off of what you had. I’m sure that was not part of the Red Bull strategy however long ago when they first started working in just extreme sports—to think, “And someday we are going to help students with PowerPoint presentations.” I’m guessing that wasn’t the plan, but starting small enough and knowing all of what you’re about and just putting all the eggs in that basket is so valuable to where you get everybody saying the same thing.
I always like to—you know, people like to think about the next thing and it’s like, “Well, that campaign worked. What are we doing next?” Rerunning the campaign that worked! Perhaps maybe we bring that back again, or a slight alteration, but just keep getting that same message and, like I say, “Do you think the people that work at Target are sick of the color red?” I’m guessing so! But you’ve got to keep it, right? Because that’s such a huge piece of knowing that you’re at Target—that you need the red and the concentric circles.
Matt Johnson: Totally, yeah. I mean, absolutely. It’s crucial to maintaining a consistent brand perception to have a really consistent execution in terms of all of your brand identifiers. I mean, there’s a reason why you walk into any Starbucks in the world and you basically know what to expect. And of course they cater slightly to geographics, but they have their core brand personality which is just so etched into every consumer experience.
The one thing I would add there is that there is a bit of interesting literature coming out about just tweaking things ever so slightly. Looking deeper in the mere exposure effect, for example, it can be galvanized further if it’s generally speaking the same experience, but something is slightly different about it. So adding in just a little bit of newness can actually increase preferences even more than just repeat exposure. So certainly there has to be a consistent execution and consistent brand identifiers to maintain consistent brand image, but being a little bit flexible with that in terms of the execution, I think can also sort of help grow the brand and help maintain this brand personality as well.
The Cadbury Gorilla and Violating Expectations
Melina Palmer: Yeah, I want to make sure we talk a little bit about some of the stuff from the book too. One of my all-time favorite examples of a commercial is one that almost no one ever talks about. I started to read it in the book and was so excited that you talk about the Cadbury gorilla, because it’s such a great example, I think. For anyone who’s not familiar, can you explain a little bit about why there would possibly be gorillas in a chocolate commercial and what the value is?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m blanking on exactly what year it was, but Cadbury Chocolate Company found themselves in a little bit of a PR dilemma—some salmonella had been caught in some of their supplies. And so they really needed to do something to just have some brand lift, get people talking about something else. And their solution was to do something totally unexpected.
If you know anything about Cadbury, they’re this sort of heritage British brand. Their colors are this regal purple; it’s a very proper brand. It’s synonymous with Easter and family. And what they did is they ran this campaign which featured a 700-pound gorilla playing 70s rock music. And then at the end it was like, “Cadbury.” And everyone’s like, “What? Cadbury?” And it was the absolute talk of the town. I mean it’s a hilarious 30-second spot. It has a gorilla in it; people like gorillas. But it wasn’t anything for the intrinsic aspects of the commercial.
What made it so brilliant was it was such a brilliant deviation from what people expect from this brand. And so this really speaks to the power of divergence and attention. Violation of expectation. When your consumers come to expect a certain type of brand personality or service, giving them something totally and completely different is a fantastic way to drive attention.
And the second piece of that is attention is always going to be relative. So if you’re a brand where your mascot is a drumming gorilla, having a drumming gorilla isn’t going to do anything in terms of capitalizing on attention. And this is what Cadbury came to learn. They said, “Oh my gosh, it’s great, everybody loves the Cadbury gorilla. Let’s just run it a second time.” And they ran it a second time and nobody really cared because they expected it. So you could sort of fool them once, but the second time people come to expect it, the reference point is set. And that’s really the key to grabbing attention: going against the grain. Once you establish a new consistency, you’ve got to find something else to violate in terms of expectation.
Melina Palmer: So I think it’s—you know, this has become an episode about the importance of expectations and which side you want to be on. We’re talking about Coca-Cola and Nike and Red Bull and working with the benefit of that expectation and creating the association in the brain and how important that is as you are trying to be a dominant brand space. And then there’s this: sometimes you want to shake it up and throw in a gorilla because that’s unexpected.
In the case of Cadbury, they needed to have a big shift because of this bad PR and trying to kind of disassociate themselves from what was happening and get people talking about something else. So going against expectations was really valuable. And while they’re not a brand that’s built on surprise in that way—like Sour Patch Kids or Burger King are maybe trying to be a little crazy, or Doritos—you expect the unexpected from them, which is a problem kind of too. So what are your thoughts on all of that? As far as advice for the marketers and brand strategists listening, where might you go with one tactic versus the other?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think there’s a short answer and a long answer. The short answer really is you have to understand what the current goals of the brand are. If you’re really trying to build a brand and trying to really cement this brand image in the mind of consumers, then consistency is really going to help. If you want to be the brand that everybody thinks of when they think of protein shakes, then you have certain associations you’re trying to build and you want to be consistent.
If that’s already in existence—if you already have brand perception but you’re trying to grab attention—then doing something a little bit unexpected is going to get people to divert their eyes. So if, going on the example of Red Bull, they are synonymous with extreme energy. That’s clear in everyone’s minds. But if they want to do something to grab attention, they might do something like a partnership with Calm or Headspace and be like, “Meditation.” That’s totally unexpected for Red Bull. And that would divert attention because it goes against the grain. So it really depends on the goals of the brand.
The long answer is that in this current era of a fragmented media landscape and the happenstance of social media by which any given post can go viral and can suck the brand in and change brand perception at any moment, brands have much less control over their brand image than ever before. And so I think brands really need to rethink how they’re constructing brand perception to begin with. I think brands really need to lean into user-generated content much more than they ever have. They need to not see themselves as the “guardian” and the “constitutional holder” of brand perception, but think about it more in terms of a co-creation with the consumer.
A brand that does that extremely well and has evolved well into this new media landscape is Chanel. Chanel is a heritage French luxury brand. For some people, Chanel is this extremely high-end, sophisticated, elegant brand. And there’s plenty of advertising materials which represents that. There’s another target market within Chanel that comes to think of Chanel as sort of like the whimsical, childlike brand—like a character in a Wes Anderson film, quirky and neat.
And Chanel is simultaneously all of these things because that’s been their advertising strategy—to put a lot out and have people interpret it in different ways. All of which coalesces around a very general brand personality, but not one which is so narrowly defined where only a certain type of person would be able to understand and appreciate it. So I think that’s the long answer: brands are needing to adapt to this new media landscape through co-creation of the brand personality and leaning into user-generated content as well.
Co-Creation and Brand Essence
Melina Palmer: Yeah, and just definitely, like you’re saying, there’s a lot of embracing what people are saying you are. Because no matter what you want to be in the back office—saying, “Well, I know some customers are saying that, but really at our core our value statement says we’re this”—it’s not going to serve you too well, right?
Matt Johnson: Totally. Yeah. I mean, the most beautifully written cursive brand constitution that sits in a back office somewhere in the headquarters that doesn’t trickle down to the actual consumer perception is completely worthless. Brands only matter if they matter to consumers. And if there’s some element or value or mission statement that doesn’t ultimately impact consumer perception, then it ceases to have any impact whatsoever.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. So there’s so much great stuff in Blindsight and all of your work, for sure. If you were going to pick a favorite tidbit from the book—a story or something that you think is really important for people in business to know and think about—what would it be?
Matt Johnson: Oh, good question. I think it would be the Psychology of Essentialism. This is chapter 10. Psychology of essentialism, I think, is an underappreciated topic within marketing. This is the general idea that we sort of see the “hidden essence” in things. We see the soul of things. So, a T-shirt that was your childhood T-shirt that you’ve always loved and stuck with you through thick and thin—it ceases to just be a physical T-shirt. If somebody were to put this T-shirt in a copying machine and give you a replica, that replica wouldn’t be the same thing. It’s this original one that has this hidden essence.
In the same way that we see souls in people—you’re not just the physical self; there’s a soul there that transcends—we see a hidden soul in objects. One of the most fascinating experiments done in this was called the “Ordinary Objects Study.” They bought just a bunch of ordinary objects off of eBay—a rubber ducky, a cup holder, a chair. Just really basic, raw material goods. And what they did then is they hired a team of writers.
The writers’ task was to just write an origin story about this rubber ducky. They had this incredible origin story about how it was made in Peru and was loved by a Peruvian family and then they lost it in the ocean and then it was picked up by a family in Indonesia, and so on. And then they resold these items on eBay with the story in mind and they sold for about 800% more.
So a little story can actually go a long way. It really is what the consumer understands to be the origin story of that product. Heritage brands are excellent at that. They’ll talk about all of the craftsmanship that went into designing this Rolls-Royce or this Birkin bag, or talk about how it was a family system passed on from generation to generation… “thousands of years of bed-making now to you in your home.” This really does enhance the value in the mind of the consumer because we do see this natural essence in ordinary products.
The Power of Individual Narratives
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And what I would lean on here is so many businesses—you see the “About Us” or “Our History” page and it’s so… I don’t have a better way to say “boring,” but it is—we’ll say blase—where they are just like, “Back in 1857, our founder was really excited about this and he was walking down the street one day…” and it just falls very flat versus getting any sort of brain activation going to where you feel tied to the brand. I have done a couple episodes on the power of story and I know some of our “DOSE” brain chemicals would come into play here. But do you have any tips for someone to take their factual timeline story and turn it into this kind of “Essentialism Rubber Ducky” story?
Matt Johnson: Yeah, so I would say a couple things. The first thing is that just like brands compete in terms of their positioning, they also compete in terms of their story. If on every single “About Us” page it’s “Back in 1880, we did this, this, and this,” then that establishes the reference point which you need to do something different from. So you’re trying to differentiate yourself.
The second thing I would say is there are some tactical things that brands can do in order to construct this narrative. One that we talk about in the book is the “individually driven narrative.” One of the goals of storytelling really is empathy. You’re really trying to get the audience to put themselves in the shoes of the company. And we can’t really empathize with a company. A company is sort of an abstract entity. It consists of multiple people.
There’s been a wealth of psychological research suggesting that the way in which we can optimize empathy is having it focus on a single individual. We really can’t empathize with groups, but we empathize very easily with individuals. So painting the “About Us” story in terms of an individual narrative can be really helpful. Sometimes that’s the founder—Steve Jobs and Apple, Elon Musk and Tesla. But it need not be the founders. It can be someone that was inspirational to the company. Orienting it towards an individual will enhance the empathetic response which really galvanizes the resonance that I think audience members will have.
Closing Thoughts and Resources
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Thank you so much for those tips and tidbits. And of course, as you said, there’s more in the book. So what’s the best way for someone to get the book and just to learn more about you?
Matt Johnson: Best way is to head to popneuro.com. We host a blog there which expands on topics relevant to the book in terms of consumer psychology, consumer behavior, and consumer neuroscience. We also host a neuromarketing bootcamp where we train marketers in the ethical application of neuroscience. You can see everything at popneuro.com.
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Well, we will link to popneuro.com and we’ll also have links for people to pick up their own copy of Blindsight. I could clearly talk to you all day long, but I’ll refrain. So thank you again, Matt, for joining me today.
Matt Johnson: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been fun.
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Dr. Matt Johnson for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, I think one of the most important things to remember is that brands are never competing only on what they do. They’re competing on what people expect, what people believe, and the meaning people attach to the experience.
The expectations people carry into an experience can change how they interpret quality, value, performance, and even enjoyment. Perception is reality. It also reinforces something I talk about often in my own work: Your story matters not because storytelling is trendy, but because the brain uses story to assign meaning. When people understand where something came from and who it’s for, the value of that offering can change dramatically.
This is true in branding, pricing, customer experience, and even internal culture. And I love helping clients apply that into their own work. If you’re interested in seeing if we might be a fit to work together, please visit thebrainybusiness.com/contact to set up a time to chat. Now here’s a question to think about as we close out: What expectations are your customers bringing into their experience with you? And are those expectations helping you or hurting you?
Come share it with me on social media. You’ll find me as “thebrainybiz” pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to my top related past episodes and books including Blindsight. Thank you again to Dr. Matt Johnson for joining me on the show today. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
