“Enemy superiority is so great that we are not in a position either to fix their forces in position or to prevent them from launching an offensive elsewhere. We just do not have the troops…. We cannot prevail in a second battle of the Somme with our men; they cannot achieve that any more.” (January 20, 1917)  — General Hermann von Kuhl, German Infantry

The purpose of this piece is not to negate or minimize the loss of life nor its historical importance.

The purpose of this piece is to draw human behavioral parallels in the world of business.

The entirety of the first world war was fought in a similar fashion to the battle of the Somme. Millions of men neatly arranged across a field in trenches, charging back and forth and dying in vast numbers for nothing but a few miles gained.

Many businesses today are guilty of similar behaviors.

The belief that through the mastery of tactics, through rigid conformation and efficiency that the battle in the marketplace can be won by simply following the predetermined rules of mutual honor. And if you throw enough money at a problem, it’ll just disappear eventually.

WWI was a short-term war, fought through tradition and conformity, through logic and numbers.

Scoresheets of the dead.

Whoever had the highest number of enemies killed was the overall winner.

The logical thing and the right thing to do, was to do things the way they had always been done, to march millions of men forward and with some self-belief the war would be won.

A war fought from a war room, detached from the day-to-day bloodshed.

Business today is a short-term world, fought with logic and numbers and traditions. With detached men and women who haven’t been outside of their bubble for quite some time, if ever.

Spreadsheets of the day, of the hour. Patience has gone out of the window.

Whoever has the most data, wins the game now.

The logical thing to do is to analyze and optimize every part of the business from an immediate point of view, everything is a cost. Certainty is required. Robert McNamara is the icon for efficiency. We need numbers people, more machines apply. There are lots of rules. We can’t break them.

If costs can be cut, then business is booming. Ignore the rest. But, we must copy the competition.

Take for example Accounting, it’s quite clear that clients pay for the services of the provider offering the most rational benefits. Such as tax saved, the experience of their handlers and the offloading of stressful financial matters to a trusted third party.

This is what an accountant may think, but they’d be wrong. Because they aren’t the customer. They don’t understand what people really think and how they really make their decisions.

But those are just clichés and rules, which are made to be broken.

KPMG, one of the top global accountancy practices launched a campaign to the cost of $950,000. Generating around $45 million in revenue. The target was a mere $5.2 in comparison. By building a mass reach, multi-channel, brand building campaign they advertised themselves as a modern and digitally transformed business using images of Whales and Birds which had nothing to do with accounting. It was playful, nice while still clear about what was actually on offer. A rare thing in today’s advertising.

They even had taxis with advertising on them park up at competitor events, dirty move and hardly professional I would argue. But that’s the point, competition isn’t fair. Fair leads to a lack of competition, fair is a stalemate.

Fair is the assumption that the Maginot line would keep Hitler out of France as long as he played by the rules.

As Dave Trott says, creativity is the last legal competitive advantage that businesses have.

And Dave Trott isn’t wrong, creative execution is quantifiably demonstrated as the leading reason for advertising success after the size of a potential market. If the message is weak, no one cares about your strategy or planning or how clever you are. Advertising’s first job is to get noticed.

However, I would argue the main reason for the overwhelming success of this campaign is simply the inherent notion that accounting is above advertising and that it dirties the professional image. So no one else was bothering with it. Most people made a load of assumptions based on their culture and their own biases as money men and women.

KPMG however, they decided to go against the grain and advertise en masse and laughed all the way to the bank.

It’s easy to shout your competition down when they are silent.

KPMG didn’t line up its troops and play by the rules of their category and all its baseless assumptions built around a conservative ideology. Instead, they played a different game and by default, they won.

Good marketing and advertising is not about victory above all else, it’s about redefining what victory actually is and how it can be achieved. It’s about shattering conventions when possible to generate substantial returns for a business. It’s about doing the unexpected, the risky and the apparently nonsensical.

While there is evidence, there are rules and there certainly are things you shouldn’t do in business. Don’t let accepted cultural norms and what’s current be the defining approach to tackling issues.

Let the rest of the competition fight in the trenches, your job is to go around them and take them out before they even notice.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Samuel Brealey

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To counter this is painful fact, it is important to recognize that discounting is a valid tool in the salesperson’s armory and one that must be well managed.

In a perfect world a business would be able to charge a unique price to each individual customer based on all of the factors affecting them; ie their assessment of the value of the item, their ability to pay and perhaps the urgency to them. There may be 100 unique factors affecting each customer’s perception of their side of the Value Scales.

If I can charge customer A a maximum of $100 for a product, but customer B is happy to pay $150 for the same item, then I want to charge them each their respective maximum.

What stops us from doing that is a variety of factors including the complexity of having different prices for different customers, and perhaps our own moral judgement of fairness. We also fear being found out by customer B and having no apparent justification for the differential.

In many businesses we get around these issues by charging the same headline price to all customers but giving varying discount levels to achieve the same thing. There is nothing wrong with this at all. This is as close as most businesses can get to the profit-maximizing approach of charging each customer a unique price.

The problem with this situation is all the points covered above. That is, there is no structure to the process, no control over individuals giving the discounts and no scoring of the amounts to understand what this costs the business each year, on each product line or for each customer.

So don’t feel you have to abandon discounting as a tool to flex price properly for your different customers. It is a valid tool but it needs very careful management, and must be designed into your overall pricing strategy.

Every Brand Needs A System For Discounting

Businesses need to get much greater control over the issue. That means better systems and procedures, tighter rules and regulations, and discipline for the frontline people who actually give this money away. It is just too easy in most businesses to give discounts, and the pain associated with the press of a computer button or the stroke of a pen on the invoice simply doesn’t equate to the actual amount of pain that should be felt from the drop in profit that follows the drop in price. If we can get the people on the frontline of a business to agree with the simple logic of the need to control discounts when they are real cash amounts it is very hard for them to ignore this logic when it is only a number on a page or computer screen.

Minimizing discounts is a critical area of pricing strategy.

You must quantify the discounts that you give away, and have good rules or systems to control them.

Changing the way you use discounts as a tool to flex price for different customers is a valid pricing strategy, providing it is properly controlled and understood by all salespeople and any others involved in the process.

Here’s seven ways brands can manage discounts:

1. Quantify the amount of discounts that you are currently giving. Get the finance team to determine the full list price value of all that you sell and compare this with the turnover that you actually achieve. Set up a system that scores this in as much detail as possible; ie certainly in total, but perhaps by salesperson, by branch, by product line, by customer, etc, if this is possible with your accounting software.

2. Set time-bound targets on how much you want this reduced by (globally or by the same subcategories as in 1) and equate this to the impact on profits of successfully achieving it; ie a drop in discounts of 5 per cent might be an increase in profits of 50 per cent.

3. Develop discount rules for your business. For example:

• Discount levels for various team members, such as counter staff are only authorized to give discounts up to 10 per cent without manager approval, managers can go to 20 percent without director’s approval, etc.
• Discounts not available where a customer account is outside of terms. That is, pay on time or pay more.
• Discounts must never be more than the profit margin being made.
• Discounts only with a minimum spend of say $100 or $1,000.

4. Once these rules have been approved by the CEO or finance team, have the pricing team design a roll-out plan so that the rules are communicated to the sales force, and in turn they communicate it to the customers.

5. Undertake discount-strategy training with all frontline people. Every one of those people must be able to explain the discount versus volume chart, and the other discounting issues covered. To demonstrate the magnitude of the discounting topic to your business, consider getting an average month’s discount in real hard cash and putting it on the table during training.

6. Make someone responsible for this cost, a Discount Controller. Get them to identify who gives the most away, what are the most common reasons for giving that discount, are some customers getting too much? Make it their job to manage the cost down. In most businesses someone newly recruited at a cost of $30k a year could easily pay for themselves by tackling the issue properly.

7. Involve your HR people and link salespeople’s performance-incentive pay to the gross margin achieved (after discounts) so they are driven to hold their nerve and limit the discounts they give.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Peter Hill, excerpted from his book Pricing For Profit in partnership with Kogan Page publishing.

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Recent years have witnessed an increase of people thinking and writing about co-creation. To the seemingly unequivocal label of ‘co-creation’, authors appoint many different things. These vary from market research to crowdsourcing, from design thinking to open innovation, and from participating research to organizational collaboration. Aiming to create clarity for brands in this conceptual swamp, we coined the term ‘complete co-creation’.

Definition And Premises Of Complete Co-creation

Complete co-creation means actively involving end-users and other relevant parties in a development process, from the identification of a challenge to the implementation and tracking of its solution. Complete co-creation is foremost a procedure which may evolve into an organizational principle, and potentially even a co-ownership. It is the transparent process of value creation in ongoing, productive collaboration with, and supported by all relevant parties, with end-users playing a central role.

A central premise of complete co-creation is that neither the various organizations in a value chain, nor the end-users can reach the ideal solution to any challenge without collaborating. This is because involved organizations and end-users have complementary knowledge and skills. The knowledge of product development and design, markets, suppliers, and sales channels is embedded within organizations.

In addition, end-users possess the key to their deeper motivations, dreams, and fears. Moreover, only end-users can provide a competitor analysis from a client’s perspective, know better than anyone how their decision making tree works, and can start word-of-mouth for the solution. This means that if all relevant parties – including the end-users – will work together on a given challenge, the solution will not only optimally serve the end-users’ needs, but will also gain acceptance and involvement of all parties responsible for its success.

Direct And Indirect Influence During Complete Co-creation

Complete co-creation does not mean that organizations share all decision making with end users and other relevant parties. Boards of directors are responsible for the choices of the organization, also when it applies complete co-creation. Complete co-creation does imply, however, that end-users and other relevant parties are actively involved in different ways and in various organizational processes. That means they are of direct and indirect influence on decisions and developments.

Indirect influence works through information and inspiration provided by the diverse parties involved, each from their own unique perspective and knowledge frame. Direct influence works through concrete ideas and advice, as well as through active involvement in the primary process of the organization.

Complete Co-creation As Related To Other Types Of Creation

The main difference between complete co-creation and other ways to solve challenges is the productive collaboration between one or more organizations, end-users, and other relevant parties throughout the development process.

Unique Characteristics Of Complete Co-creation

The most distinguishing characteristic of complete co-creation is the central role of end-users. Activities focused on value creation that fail to involve end-users, do not qualify as complete co-creation. End-users can add to a co-creation process in different ways, online as well as offline. Think active participation in creative sessions, optimization sessions, creative briefs, presentations to stakeholders, etc.

Another distinguishing characteristic is productivity. That refers to the premise that complete co-creation always leads to an implementable solution. When end-users and other relevant parties were involved, but failed to implement a concrete solution, the process does not qualify as complete co-creation.

Design Thinking And Complete Co-Creation

The popular movement of design thinking focuses on a creative, out of the box approach of challenges. User experience is its vantage point. Qualitative exploratory market research is the usual tool for gaining understanding of user experience, followed by concept testing.

Although design thinking is definitely a customer-centric approach and can very well be used to shape a complete co-creation trajectory, end-user involvement does not automatically make it co-creation. Only if end-users play an active, co-developing role in every step of the development process does design thinking fit the criteria for complete co-creation.

What Are The Three C’s For Effect Maximization?

• Customer connection – an ongoing relationship between organization and end-users – is a precondition for complete co-creation.
• Customer insight – a deep understanding of end-users’ motivations – is the central guideline for complete co-creation.
• We refer to customer connection, customer insight, and complete co-creation as the three C’s for effect maximization.

Customer Connection, Customer Insight, And Complete Co-creation

There are three reasons why consistent implementation of the three C’s leads to effect maximization.

First: organizations that maintain continuous contact with their end-users through various online and offline channels know the unmet needs in their market and can respond to these faster and with greater relevance than their less customer connected competitors.

Second: organizations that take customer insight as a basis for their decision making are recognizable and attractive to their end-users.

Third: organizations that structurally embrace customer connection, customer insight, and complete co-creation create maximum relevance for their end-users, which often comes with sympathy, resulting in end-user loyalty.

‘The Future Isn’t Created, It’s Co-Created’ ~ Nilofa Merchant

We are in the middle of a paradigm shift. For decades, our world followed the rules of what we call the ‘Power Paradigm’.

Recent years, however, reflect a growing realization that we can accomplish more together than alone, and that sharing leads to better solutions, better experiences, and ultimately to a better world. This is driving more and more individuals, groups, and organizations to change their ways. The ambition to work towards a better world not only gives rise to fierce criticism of the singular focus on profit growth that characterizes many large corporations, but also to a new paradigm: the ‘Co-creation Paradigm’.

Contributed by Branding Strategy Insider by: Stefanie Jansen and Maarten Pieters, the authors of The 7 Principles of Complete Co-Creation.

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To some extent one has to acknowledge a certain level of genius in Steve Jobs. Also worth noting is that very few leaders possess those same qualities—despite their proclamations to the contrary. And yet, for those who believe they possess a Steve Jobs-like amount of insight, little will dissuade them.

Overcoming The Steve Jobs Myth

A deeper look reveals a more complex story behind the Steve Jobs genius myth. It’s true that Apple has created some of the most successful consumer products ever. However, its successes are, for the most part, ones in which one person interacts with one machine to do one thing. Apple’s failures in software (remember MobileMe?) and social networking (Ping) demonstrate that the development process that serves the company well in some spheres is not sufficient to deal with most complex software-based services. iTunes, formerly a model of simplicity and power, is now routinely held up as an example of corporate bloatware.

Apple’s traditional process, however, is filled with experimentation; it just experiments in secret. Rumors that Apple was working on a phone circulated for years before the first iPhone shipped. The design press is filled with photos of early Apple prototypes. Prototypes, as powerful as they are, can teach you only so much. They can’t reveal what happens when thousands of people are using your software at the same time; they can’t help you discover and capture the value presented by emergent behavior. As with the Amazon Fire Phone, covert efforts can reveal only so much. At some point, the ideas have to be tested in the wild.

The Power Of Cultural Values

What Apple can teach us, though, is the power of vision and the ability of vision and culture to create alignment. A manager who worked at an Apple partner company in the 1990s told us a story of working with an Apple team to create a product bundle. Apple had sought out this partner because Apple wanted to include one of the company’s products in the bundle. But first, the Apple managers wanted changes to the partner product. Specifically, they objected to the setup process the product required. “It has to work out of the box,” an Apple manager said, expressing the cultural value Apple places on customer experience. “If it doesn’t work out of the box,” he said, “we don’t ship it.” This is the power of alignment. It’s a cultural value that everyone in the firm knows and that guides decision making. This obsession— with quality, with design, with out-of-the-box experience—wasn’t something only Steve Jobs delivered. It was something he was able to make the entire firm deliver.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, excerpted from their book Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and New Create Products Continuously. Shared with permission of Harvard Business Review Press.

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What Is The “Nonconscious” Level Of The Mind?

Gladwell calls this part of the mind the “adaptive unconscious.” He points out that the brain uses two methods for decisions: the conscious level where we think about what we have learned; it is logical and definitive. But it is slow and needs lots of information. The second method, the “adaptive unconscious” operates “ …entirely below the surface level of consciousness.” This is the part of the brain that jumps to conclusions instantly. Gladwell likens it to “ . . . a giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

Most of Gladwell’s ideas came from Timothy Wilson, a professor at the University of Virginia. Wilson is the author of “Strangers to Ourselves – Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious“. First, let’s look at Wilson’s definition of “the unconscious:” it is “ . . . anything that is in your mind that you are not consciously aware of at a particular point in time . . .mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior.” Wilson’s definition of the “unconscious” is pretty close to the standard ones from various dictionaries and is virtually the same as the definitions for “the subconscious”: From the Oxford Dictionary: “The Unconscious: the part of the mind which is inaccessible to the conscious mind but which affects behavior and emotions. The Subconscious: the part of the mind of which one is not fully aware but which influences one’s actions and feelings.”

The foundation of Wilson’s book, and the subsequent best-seller “Blink,” is Wilson’s theory that the unconscious mind developed in man through traditional Darwinian evolutionary principles – i.e., as a survival mechanism. Wilson invented the term “adaptive unconscious” to ” . . . convey that nonconscious thinking is an evolutionary adaptation. The ability to size up our environments, disambiguate them, interpret them and initiate behavior quickly and nonconsciously confers a survival advantage and thus was selected for [in a Darwinian sense].”

How Does The “Adaptive Unconscious” Control Conscious Thinking, Feeling And Behavior?

In order for Wilson’s “adaptive unconscious” to influence or control judgments, feelings, or behavior there needs to be a biological mechanism for the “adaptive unconscious” to first acquire the information needed to do the influencing. Wilson references Professor Joseph LeDoux’s work at New York University in this regard. LeDoux has shown that information from the environment is taken in by our senses (eyesight, for example) and is sent first to the thalamus gland and then to the amygdala and hippocampus glands (all found in the brain) where it is stored as a “memory.”

A recent article by Dr. R. Douglas Fields, a senior researcher at the U.S. Government’s National Institutes of Health, has further shown the electro-chemical mechanics of how memories are stored in our brains: ” Both long- and short-term memories arise from the connections between neurons, at points of contact called synapses, where one neuron’s signal-emitting extension, called an axon, meets any of an adjacent neuron’s dozens of signal-receiving fingers, called dendrites. When a short-term memory is created, stimulation of the synapse is enough to temporarily “strengthen,” or sensitize, it to subsequent signals. For a long-term memory, the synapse strengthening becomes permanent. Scientists have been aware since the 1960s, however, that this requires genes in the neuron’s nucleus to activate, initiating the production of proteins. One does not always know beforehand what events should be committed permanently to memory. The moment-to-moment memories necessary for operating in the present are handled well by transient adjustments in the strength of individual synapses. But when an event is important enough or is repeated enough, synapses fire to make the neuron in turn fire neural impulses repeatedly and strongly, declaring “this is an event that should be recorded.” The relevant genes turn on, and the synapses that are holding the short-term memory when the synapse-strengthening proteins find them, become, in effect, tattooed.” (R. Douglas Fields, “Making Memories Stick,” Scientific American, January 24, 2005).

LeDoux’s experiments on memory also show that acquired information [the stuff of memory], especially emotion-laden information, can be quite permanent: “It appears to be quite difficult to get rid of emotional memories, and at best we can hope only to keep them under wraps.” (Le Doux, “Emotion, Memory and the Brain,” Scientific American, June, 1994 – updated in 2002). LeDoux further points out that “memory” itself is a process of retrieving earlier conscious experiences, again through the mechanism of the amygdala gland: “Emotional and declarative [facts and events] memories are stored and retrieved in parallel, and their activities are joined seamlessly in our conscious experience. That does not mean that we have direct conscious access to our emotional memory; it means instead that we have access to the consequences – such as the way we behave or the way our bodies feel. . . Emotion is not just unconscious memory: it exerts a powerful influence on declarative memory and other thought processes.” (LeDoux, Scientific American article).

In other words, there is a scientifically proven way for these memories to be acquired and stored in our minds (i.e., in Wilson’s “adaptive unconscious” mind.) And our memories. of past events in our lives can be a significant controlling force on our judgments, feelings, and behavior.

Memory And Imprinting

For marketing and market research the important aspect of the memories stored in our “adaptive unconscious” is that consumers will react to new information and situations based upon what is already inside their “adaptive unconscious” memory banks. Another way to think about these stored memories is to consider them as similar to “imprints.” Konrad Lorenz discovered the process of “imprinting” in the 1930’s and won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1973. Lorenz found that he had become a substitute “mother” for some orphaned goslings once he began to feed them. He theorized that he had become “imprinted” in their brains as their mother.

“Imprinting” is defined as a kind of learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior. It typically involves an animal or person learning the characteristics of some stimulus (using any of our senses), which is therefore said to be “imprinted” onto the subject. Thinking about how this relates to marketing, consumers can get “imprinted” with brands and their emotional experiences with them, and usually the strongest imprints are the first ones experienced.

Tim Wilson referenced William Hamilton, an early 20th Century psychologist, on the subject of imprinting: “William Hamilton wrote extensively about the way in which habits acquired early in life become an indispensable part of one’s personality. These mental processes were said to constitute a kind of ‘automatic self” to which people had no conscious access.” This means that we cannot recall our imprints on a conscious level when queried about them; they are below the surface, in the “adaptive unconscious.”

Wilson also sees the importance of what he calls “implicit learning” [i.e., imprinting] by the “adaptive unconscious: He gives as an example the following: “Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists and attending classes on grammar and syntax. they would be hard pressed to explain what participles are, despite their ability to use them fluently. Humans learn to speak with no effort or intention: it just happens . . . implicit learning is one of the most important functions of the “adaptive unconscious.”

Dr. Howard Hoffman, a Professor at Bryn Mawr, who is a leader in the field of imprinting research, has said that Lorenz originally thought that imprinting occurred only within a short early development span of time. However he comments that, “Instead the latest findings lead to the unexpected conclusion that imprinting occurs in many species including man and that it entails much more plastic and forgiving mechanisms than were claimed by Lorenz. ” Additional research has indicated that imprints, once lodged in our brains, can be a strong influence on thinking, emotions and behavior. (One of the more important recent studies about imprinting and memory was reported by Professor Gabriel Horn of Cambridge University in the U.K: “Pathways of the Past: The Imprint of Memory” Nature Magazine, February 2004). From a marketing research standpoint, imprints are the “content” of memory and need to be discovered in order to go beyond just conscious sources of information.

Our memory bank, or “adaptive unconscious,” contains the imprints from our past experiences. As Gladwell points out in “Blink.” “We use the adaptive unconscious whenever we meet something new and have to make a decision quickly and under stress.” And, even though many of our imprints have been in our memory bank for a long time, they can still exert tremendous influence on our thinking and behavior. Gladwell (in “blink”) relates the story about how a well-known art expert could make a major error in thinking that a fake bronze statue was authentic; the art expert’s first purchase had been this bronze statue: “When you are a young man, you do fall in love with your first purchase, and perhaps this was his first love. Notwithstanding his unbelievable knowledge, he was obviously unable to question his first assessment [of the fake bronze].”

Wilson also sees the initial imprints as a key factor in affecting our thinking and behavior on the conscious level: “It is well-known that first impressions are powerful, even when they are based on faulty information. The “adaptive unconscious” is thus more than just a gatekeeper, deciding what information to admit to consciousness.. . It is also a spin doctor that interprets information outside of awareness.” For marketing and market research, then, it is crucially important to investigate and discover the subconscious imprints associated with product categories and brands. These are the real factors that drive consumer behavior.

Our Stored Emotions

One of the reasons it is so important to discover the imprints in the subconscious (Wilson and Gladwell’s “adaptive unconscious”) is because the most powerful imprints are usually tagged with a high level of emotional content. It is these emotions that can be the drivers of our behavior, even more so than our cold, analytical conscious thinking.

Tim Wilson considers the “adaptive unconscious” to also act as an evaluator of our feelings: “Not only does the adaptive unconscious select and interpret, it feels . . . it is now clear that feelings are functional, not excess baggage that impede decision making . . . [one of the] most important functions of the adaptive unconscious is to generate these feelings.”

For Wilson “feelings” are a key part of humans’ evolutionary progress. Feelings, he indicates, are our “Psychological Immune System.” They protect us from things that might make us feel bad, and promote things that make us feel good. He points out that the “adaptive unconscious” of our mind follows this rule: “ . . . select, interpret, and evaluate information in ways that make me feel good.” Marketing research needs to find out what those “feel good” emotions are for their brand and the search can only take place by researching the “adaptive unconscious.”

The “Adaptive Unconscious” And Personality

Wilson also posits a role for the “adaptive unconscious” in helping to understand the factors influencing people’s personality. For many marketers and researchers, this area is of prime concern: by knowing who their customers are from a personality standpoint, they can better construct and “mirror” the personality of their brand.

What is personality? Wilson uses the late Harvard professor Gordon Allport’s definition of personality: “. The psychological processes that determine a person’s characteristic behavior and thought.” Allport’s goal was to be able to predict what people will do. But Wilson points out that most research has shown that personality traits are not very good predictors of future behavior: ” Research by Walter Mischel [professor at Columbia University] shook up the field because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior.” The reason for this, Wilson points out, is not that personality traits are bad predictors: “A lot of the confusion about personality and its relation to behavior has resulted from a failure to distinguish between the conscious and the nonconscious systems. There is increasing evidence that people’s constructed [conscious] self bears little correspondence to their nonconscious self. One consequence of this fact is that the two personalities predict different kinds of behavior: the adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people’s deliberative, explicit responses.” What this means for marketers and researchers is that we need to know the subconscious (“adaptive unconscious”) personality traits in order to predict behavior.

Can We Rely On Any Information From The Consumers’ Conscious Mind?

Yes, there is information from consumers’ conscious minds that probably has some validity, especially when it is related to the factual details of past events in the consumers lives. However, once we enter into the realm of imprinting, emotional memories, and personality it is the subconscious (Wilson’s “adaptive unconscious”) that must be explored for answers.

Many marketers and market researchers have long suspected the importance of the subconscious, but have rarely tried to learn from it or to influence its power on consumer behavior. In the area of market research, projective tests such as sentence completion tests and word association tests have been tried in order to tap into the subconscious indirectly. However the projective tests were still conducted and directed toward the conscious mind to retrieve the information. As Gladwell, Wilson and others have proven, this fails, since the conscious mind cannot access the subconscious or “adaptive unconscious” mind.

Wilson also references the psychological research reported by Daniel Wegner of Harvard, “It became clear that people could not verbalize many of the cognitive processes that psychologists assumed were occurring inside their heads . . . a picture has emerged of a set of . . . mental processes that occur largely out of view. Indeed some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and the conscious will may be an illusion.” Wilson also cites the work of Joachim Brunstein at the University of Potsdam in Germany which concluded that, “. [There is] little correspondence, on average, between people’s nonconscious and conscious motives.”

In addition to the many examples concerning our lack of conscious knowledge of our own subconscious minds in the field of psychology testing, Wilson reported a number of examples from the market research field. In one example, Wilson did a test with women and pantyhose. He arranged four pairs of pantyhose on a table, from left to right, and asked women to choose which pair they preferred. The test results indicated an order bias with the preferences for the pairs increasing from left to right on the table. However, all four pairs of pantyhose were identical. When asked for their reasons for preferences, respondents in the test could not explain their choices and did not agree even that there was an “order effect” once it was finally pointed out. To them. Wilson concluded that “. People do not [consciously] know [the] reasons for their feelings, judgments and actions.”

In further discussing consumers reporting reasons for their behavior on the conscious level, Wilson commented that, in the case of someone ordering a chicken sandwich at a fast food restaurant or buying an analgesic, that the “adaptive unconscious” may have made [those] decision[s]: “ . . . the causal role of conscious thought has been vastly overrated; instead, it is often a post-hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious . . . people cannot discover through simple introspection the extent to which seeing an ad for Tylenol influences their purchases the next time they go to the grocery store . . ”

The evidence from these and other scientific studies points to the need to explore the subconscious to get at valid consumer information about their true thoughts and feelings.

Is There A Way To Access Gladwell And Wilson’s “Adaptive Unconscious?”

Tim Wilson, in “Strangers to Ourselves,” the source book for Gladwell’s “blink” says no: “ . . .there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try. Because our minds have evolved to operate largely outside of consciousness, and nonconscious processing is part of the architecture of the brain, it may not be possible to gain direct access to nonconscious processes.” [my emphasis]. This may be a matter of semantics in that Wilson does not believe we can access nonconscious processing. However, there are an enormous number of studies showing that the content in our subconscious mind can be accessed. The method for doing this is hypnosis.

Hypnosis is a scientifically verified state of mind that is different from the conscious state of mind. Daniel Wegner, the Harvard Professor, has written that, “Evidence from neuropsychobiological research using various brain scan methods and measures of brain electrical activity indicates that hypnosis prompts unique patterns.” (Professor David Spiegel’s work at Stanford University also has shown this via brain scans using PET technology.) As for the ability of hypnosis to access the subconscious content, Wegner indicated that, “People find that they are able to control the . . . recall of memory . . . in ways that are not readily available to them when they are not hypnotized, ” and that “ . . . the hypnotized person has the unique ability to achieve certain sorts of control over the mind and body that are not within the capability of the waking individual. It is as though in hypnosis a normal layer of conscious controlling apparatus is cleared away to yield a more subtle and effective set of techniques. ” (From “The Illusion of Conscious Will,” MIT Press, 2002).

One of the best academic research studies on hypnosis in consumer research was conducted by Professor William J. McDonald of Hofstra University (“Consumer Decision Making and Altered States of Consciousness: A study of dualities,” Journal of Business Research, 42, 287-294, 1998.) McDonald’s hypotheses were that (a) verbalizations from consumers about their product purchases would differ under hypnosis versus when they are awake, and (b) that the verbalizations would be more emotional under hypnosis. Both hypotheses were proven correct in the study. Additionally, respondents under hypnosis were less inhibited about their feelings. The study reported that hypnotized respondents used significantly more emotional and sensual language to describe their purchasing behavior than non-hypnotized respondents. “The unconscious nature of emotions is important to marketers because consumers evidently have motives for their decision making which are not readily discoverable from traditional research approaches. If marketers are misled by explanations for buyer behavior that emphasize rational theories about what consumers do, they may in turn make choices about advertising and other strategies which are less than optimal or even detrimental to the strength of their brand. ”

Along with the many scholarly studies conducted verifying the ability of hypnosis to uncover the content of the subconscious mind, especially with regard to memory, imprinting and emotions, I have conducted over 1,000 focus groups using hypnosis during the past 30 years. In virtually every focus group we were able to get respondents to recall product category and brand memories, including imprints of first or early experiences and the emotions attached to them, in ways they were not able to recall when in the awake “conscious” mental state. We were also able to use personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, with hypnotized respondents that provided a different perspective on customer profiles and brand personality.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book “blink” has served to popularize the idea that the subconscious can be the driving force behind our thinking, emotions and behavior. However, as I have indicated here on Branding Strategy Insider, there is also a long and deep foundation for “blink” in the research done by Tim Wilson and others in the academic world. With a firm understanding of the consumer subconscious mind, marketers and market researchers can gain the information they need to further enhance the success of their brands. Hypnosis is the only way to get access to this area of the consumer’s mind.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Hal Goldberg

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