Brands and Our Brains: a Love Story

Tom Hord is a freelance brand / account strategist in Chicago looking for a full-time gig, and obviously isn’t above saying that every chance he gets.

Ask him questions or let him know you liked this article at @hordlove on Twitter.

If you read yesterday’s article about brand names and the origin of language, I hinted that there would be a part II to that discussion. Now that I’ve really gotten going, I’m planning a part III tomorrow, too!

We’ve covered how different sounds, broken into phonetic units called phonemes, can influence the implicit associations our brains make with brands to create brand equity. But did you know there’s another neurological reason why we’re so influenced by a good brand name? It has to do with how our brains were first set up to process language itself.

In 2007, two researchers, Possidonia Gontijo and Shi Zhang, made a fascinating study of the neuropsychology of brands entitled “The Mental Representation of Brand Names: Are Brand Names a Class by Themselves?”

Gontijo and Zhang begin by establishing that “brand names are perhaps one of the most valuable of the intangible assets a company possesses,” which sounds like marketing 101 to most of us: the primary interface between a prospective consumer’s mind and a product is the very name of that product itself. The brand name will obviously appear on all communications and packaging. Of course it’s important.

It gets more interesting, I promise. What Gontijo and Zhang did was use functional brain scans to map neurological activity. If you scan for language activity in the mind, ordinary language is what you would call a lateralized function — one that is predominantly located in only one hemisphere of the brain (in language’s case, it’s the left hemisphere). However, functional brain scans show that there are exceptions to this: both proper nouns (words you associate with specific identities, like your relationships to people and other one-of-a-kind places or things) and, within that group, brand names. Both of these types of identities involve additional activity in the right hemisphere of the human brain, which Gontijo and Zhang suggested may provide evidence at the neural level that brand names have a finer degree of conceptual organization than previously suspected.

Whatever brand equity means to you, the fact that you’re using the right hemisphere of your brain to construct it at all seems to point at a greater, more complex feeling, an emotional tie to the brand name itself on a neurological level — similar to a relationship with a person.

What do we do with this information? We already knew the personal quality of brand-consumer relationships are incredibly important, but we didn’t know quite how biologically similar they are in the brain to human relationships. If you want to be part of another person’s life, you take steps to do things with them, be there for them, and not to injure or inconvenience them in any way. Just as you would remember something a family member, friend, or coworker did or said, so too will your consumers be slow to forget an action your brand took that affected them either positively or negatively. Being a brand in someone’s life isn’t just business; you have to approach it as a human relationship, because that’s how your consumer’s brain actually processes it. We’ve been told as marketers and advertisers from early on to think of brands as people, as a series of interactions with a consumer that build a relationship over time, as the possessor of a reputation that takes a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. Now with the neurological proof in our hands, these brain scans seem to show that we weren’t very far off at all.

As always, a huge thanks for reading, from me.

-Tom

This article is Part II of a series.

If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

Part III will be available tomorrow!

Tom Hord is a freelance brand / account strategist in Chicago looking for a full-time gig, and obviously isn’t above saying that every chance he gets.

Ask him questions or let him know you liked this article at @hordlove on Twitter.