Why this idea means business : We explore the psychology behind brand consideration. Learn how different brain areas shape the way customers consider brands. Read this for ideas on reconsidering consideration.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To use lessons from customer psychology to increase brand consideration. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – More customers
- Skill area – Psychology | Marketing
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. new customers = +80 (+8%)
- Est. sales increase = +$8k (monthly) | +$96k (annual)
Once customers become aware of your brand, your logical next job is to get them to consider buying it. However, many factors influence how this works.
For example, say it’s a new customer to a category. Maybe someone who’s moved country and is doing their first grocery shop.
They don’t really know the brands in-store. So they put lots of logical effort into their purchase decisions. They explore all the options and weigh up alternatives before buying.
Compare that to the mental effort existing customers make. They pick their usual brands without a second thought. That only changes if something triggers them to reconsider. For example, their usual brand is out of stock or they’re tempted by another brand’s sales promotion.
The consideration effort customers put in also depends on the purchase type. Small, everyday purchases with few consequences (e.g. buying chewing gum) need little mental effort. However, big, life-impacting purchases with consequences (e.g. choosing a family holiday) require lots of thought.
Different areas of our brains shape how these considerations work. However, before we get to that, let’s review what brand consideration means in marketing terms.
Where brand consideration fits into marketing
Brand consideration is the middle stage in the brand choice funnel. It’s where customers actively think about what to buy. Customers might be aware of your brand. but if they don’t consider it as an option. then you’ll never get them to try it.
So marketers must try to understand what’s going on in customers’s heads at this stage and try to influence that thinking.
You might think brand consideration is all about engaging the logical part of the brain.
However, this isn’t the case. Usually, other brain areas decide whether a brand should be considered before the logical brand gets involved.
The role of instinct on brand consideration
For example, your instincts often act as the initial gatekeeper for brand consideration. They decide what information makes it to your emotional and logical brains for consideration. Everything else is dismissed as irrelevant.
They instantly assess any new brand activation and decide whether to say to the rest of your brain, Hey, look at this. Your instincts look for subtle cues in how brands position themselves to see whether it’s worth engaging your emotional and logical brain.
The most common factors influencing this instinctive evaluation include :-
- prior mental associations.
- beliefs.
- habits.
Prior mental associations
Our instincts help us make sense of the world by making instant mental associations between new sensory inputs (handled by our emotional system – more on that shortly) and prior experiences.
For example, we instinctively know that red means stop and green means go.
Your logical brain doesn’t think about these; you just instinctively know.
Smart brand marketers use these instinctive associations to shape brand consideration.
For example, the colour blue is associated with trust, calmness and serenity. If you sell in a category where those are motivating brand values, (e.g. finance or healthcare), you should dial up the blueness of your brand identity and communications.
Beliefs
Our instincts are also where our beliefs live – our views on the world and how it works.
These are learned patterns of behaviour based on our own direct experience or the shared experience of others.
For brand consideration, this is often reflected in word of mouth. As a new customer, you don’t know which brands to consider. But your beliefs tell you that people more experienced with the category (e.g. family, friends, and other influencers) will be worth listening to for reviews and recommendations.
Take restaurants, for example. Our beliefs instinctively tell us that those with many positive reviews should be considered more than those that don’t. However, we rarely think logically about these. If we did, we might ask if all those positive reviewers had been influenced to make such recommendations. Or whether their tastes were similar to ours.
Our beliefs are hard to shift once established. So, marketers trying to drive brand consideration should research their customers to get a deeper understanding about what they believe.
Habits
Finally, our instincts also manage our habits. These are our brains’ autopilot mode e.g. we follow the same route to work every day or drink a glass of wine when we get home to shed the day’s baggage.
For brand consideration, habits benefit market leaders more as they encourage the repeat buying of them as the category’s most familiar brand. Challenger brands, on the other hand, have to find ways to disrupt instinctive habitual behaviour. They need to engage the emotional and logical areas of the brain to decide to act differently.
Instinctive Izzy on Brand Consideration
Instinctive Izzy, our guide to the instinctive parts of our brain had this to say about brand consideration :-
“Well, I only lead this when it’s something quick or not a big deal. If Emotional Eddy and Logical Lou are happy to go with my snap judgment, I’ll quickly scan what’s there and say yes or no right away. Can’t really explain why. Logical Lou would probably say it’s something to do with what I remember from being a kid. Or why I feel more relaxed when I sit in the garden. Don’t know. Don’t really care. It’s just about doing what’s necessary.”
The role of emotion on brand consideration
Our emotional brains kicking in signals a deeper level of brand consideration. Our instincts make instant decisions and move on. However, emotional reactions last longer, and have more impact on our decision-making.
In fact, without our emotions, we’d find it hard to make decisions. There’s a famous research case on this by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Patient Elliot had to have a brain tumour removed that affected his emotional (limbic system) brain.
His brain’s logical area could still gather and analyse facts. However, without emotions, he was almost completely unable to make decisions about those facts.
Our brain’s emotional system influences consideration as it looks after how our brains manage :-
- Sensory inputs.
- Memories.
- Fight or flight (or reward) responses.
Sensory inputs
The thalamus in our brain’s emotional system acts as the central hub for almost all our sensory inputs. What we see, hear, touch and taste. (smell works slightly differently).
This matters for brand consideration as almost all the activities that build consideration involve creating some sort of sensory experience.
For example, the visual cues of the product design and the compelling copy on the packaging.
The aural cues of the advert’s voiceover e.g. using deeper, slower-speaking voices to sound more authoritative. And, if relevant, how a product feels when we touch it, or how it tastes when we eat it. All sensory influences on how customers consider brands. We’re rarely aware of these, but they’re there in the background emotionally influencing which brands we consider.
Memories
These sensory associations are triggered by our memories. And those are handled by another part of our emotional brain, the hippocampus.
For brand consideration, the goal here is for brands to create strong positions in the customer’s memory. After all, a brand is just an association of ideas that a customer holds in their heads.
Brand assets like the logo and the brand colours help reinforce and signal these associations. This helps customers recognise the brand quicker and access memories about it more easily.
Brand consideration goes up as customers are more likely to consider brands they’re familiar with.
The memory associations can also be more conceptual. For example, a brand’s personality and tone of voice often affect whether customers consider it or not. Maybe it’s too loud and overconfident. Or it’s too stuffy and dull.
Customers might not know your specific brand. However, if they’ve had negative past experiences with other brands who have a similar personality or tone of voice, they might reject you. So again, marketers need to research customers to understand what related memories your brand activities might stir in them.
Fight or flight (or reward) responses
The final area of the brain’s emotional system that influences consideration is the amygdala.
Driven by inputs from our instincts and memories, it’s the part of our brain that handles how we handle threats and risks.
More commonly known as our “fight or flight” response, it spots flaws and failings in a brand’s marketing mix. It either makes you walk away (flight) or dispute what the brand offers (fight).
The amygdala only lets brands in for consideration if it recognises what they offer to be “safe” and beneficial. This is usually triggered by the amygdala recognising the “reward” potential in what’s on offer.
Rewards in the brain are heightened by the release of the brain’s reward hormone, dopamine. This tells other parts of the brain to see what’s on offer more positively. So, to drive brand consideration, make sure your brand’s benefits can be easily perceived as rewarding.
Emotional Eddy on Brand Consideration
Emotional Eddy, our guide to the emotional side of our brains had this to say about brand consideration :-
“I know what I like and don’t like, though I can’t always say why. But when the right brand gets in front of me, I can just feel whether it’s worth considering. There’ll be something about how it looks or sounds or feels that just triggers a feeling inside me. However, if something’s off, and I feel myself frowning or I get a tingle on the back of my neck, I know right away that brand’s not right for me.”
The role of logic on brand consideration
Consideration is defined as thinking carefully about something. So, of course, the logical brain eventually gets involved at some point.
The marketing challenge though is that it doesn’t involve itself in every purchase decision. If instincts and emotions decide logic’s not needed, then there’s no rational consideration.
When your brand does make it past Instinctive Izzy and Emotional Eddy, the main logical thought processes to consider are :-
- evaluating options.
- visualising consequences.
- being pragmatic.
Evaluating options
Our logical brain evaluates the relative merits of different options. It weighs up pros and cons. Advantages and disadvantages. Ponders whether benefit A matters more than benefit B.
You might expect this thinking to be objective. To regard only facts and be detached from outside influences. However, it’s surprisingly hard for our logical brains not to be influenced by illogical influences, particularly those of our instinctive and emotional brains.
For example, our high ticket product page article looks at two different TVs with similar product features. A Linsar TV that costs $999 and a Samsung one that costs over $4,000.
Our logical brain suggests that if they offer similar features, there’s no reason to buy the expensive one. But, our instinctive brain tells us that the better known a brand is (Samsung in this case), the better its quality and reliability. And our emotional brain reminds us that we’ve enjoyed using other Samsung products in the past but haven’t heard of Linsar before. So, suddenly, our logical brand consideration brain has to factor in a lot of other illogical inputs.
Visualising consequences
Our logical brains also help us visualise our decisions’ consequences. These visions influence which brands we consider for several reasons.
First, when your purchase is visible to others (like a new car, for example), you consider what your choice will make others think of you. If you value status, you go for more expensive, big-name brands to show you can afford them. But if your self-image is more that you prefer value to branding, you choose something more sensible.
Then, even if your purchase is less visible, you still think about future scenarios where you use that purchase. Does it come with a warranty or guarantee, for example? What’s the brand’s reputation for customer service? What do other customers who’ve bought this brand say about it? If a brand has lots of positive reviews, that reassures our logical brains that it’s worth considering.
Being pragmatic
Finally, our logical brain also helps us fit how much we consider our purchase decisions into everything else going on in our lives. It allocates just enough time and effort to make a “good enough” decision, without letting us slide slowly into a state of indecisive procrastination.
It’s why the logical brain barely registers those everyday, easy purchases and instead dedicates its time to purchases with consequences. It makes logical sense to exert more brain power on buying a car than on which brand of toilet paper to buy, right?
Logical Lou on Brand Consideration
Logical Lou, our guide to the logical side of our brains had this to say about brand consideration :-
“Ideally, I’d give every decision my full time and attention. But realistically, that takes too much time and effort. So I make a conscious choice about what to consider and what to leave to Emotional Eddy and Instinctive Izzy. I know which brands and categories I need to consider deeply because they’re the ones with high involvement and lots of consequences. Being pragmatic, it’s usually fine to let all the small decisions slide by.”
Conclusion - A cleverer consideration of brand consideration
Most marketers tend to think of brand consideration as a very logical process. They make a big assumption that customers weigh up the pros and cons of all their purchases before they decide what to buy.
But as we’ve seen, there’s often far more going on in the brain than this simplistic view suggests. Both our instincts and our emotions have an influential role in brand consideration depending on the category / customer context.
Many have tried to find a single defining model of brand consideration (e.g. McKinsey’s decision journey model). However, like most other in marketing thinking, the key is understanding what’s going on with your specific customer. Do your research to crack what makes them consider some brands and not others. That’s the smart way to get customers to consider you.
For more on brand consideration, check out our brand identity guide. For more on how the brain works, check out our profiles of Instinctive Izzy, Emotional Eddy and Logical Lou. Or contact us if you want some Three-Brains power thinking about your brand consideration challenges.
Photo credits
Woman peeking out from bush : Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Cafe : Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash
Two women clinking wine glasses together : Photo by Zan on Unsplash
Dog ears : Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash
Bookshelf : Photo by Jamie Taylor on Unsplash
Heart Button : Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Entering the ring : Photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash
Woman on couch reading : Photo by iam Se7en on Unsplash
Legal scales : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Man looking at ceiling (adapted) : Photo by Anton Danilov on Unsplash
Wooden Gavel : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
