What’s your story?
Everyone has a personal narrative, cognitive anthropologist Bob Deutsch told LSB Brandworks University 2008 participants. And most likely that story you tell about yourself includes the brands and products you surround yourself with.
The relationship of those brands to your story is called attachment and Deutsch promised to show Brandworks University attendees “How the mind creates beliefs, belonging and emotional connections.” In other words, “How to design attachment into everything you do.”
“Attachment is not just a marketing phenomenon. It’s nothing less than the engine of history. It’s what people go for in terms of politics, romance, purchase; that’s what drives the world. As an industry, when we do it well, it actually changes culture.
“A brand is not positive product attributes associated with good value, price and quality. People don’t do it that way. Brand loyalty is obtained only under one condition from the mind’s point of view: when a person’s story about themselves gets metaphorically merged in their story of you in their thinking and feeling.”
When he listens to the narratives people tell about products and brands, Deutsch said, the best stories end with the words “I’m like that.”
“They don’t want to be loyal to you; they want to be loyal to themselves and you’re just a venue for that.”
But to understand attachment, Deutsch said, you have to understand three precepts that are foreign to many marketers:
- People are not simply consumers. “Consumer is too small of a concept. I don’t know anything about consumers; I only know about people.”
- Words count. Words mold our thinking and our fears. So be careful of the terms you use. Such common marketing phrases as “engaging the target” can distance you from the real people you want to reach.
The human brain evolved to act, not to think. We all try to make our marketing messages logical and include relevant product attributes. But the mind says, “I don’t do rational.”
Of course, Deutsch said, “People are not illogical, but they’re not logical either. It’s not chaos. We operate under E-logic. Emotion and logic.” Think vs. feel is a false dichotomy, Deutsch argued. “It’s one word: think-feel.”
“Once a brand achieves emotional attachment, all the attributes fall away and you have a rock solid unified connection with the consumer. But when your brand gets articulated in terms of attributes, then it gets commoditized and neutralized. Attributes can be argued about.”
The only real brand promise is the one from the Wizard of Oz. It’s the Yellow Brick Road that you provide so they can walk it and become more of their own story.
Bob Deutsch is founder of Wellfleet, MA consulting firm Brain Sells. His commentaries have appeared on ABC’s Nightline, Good Morning America, PBS, and National Geographic. He received his doctorate from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine where he was a staff member on the “Project on Human Communication” that pioneered the analyses of, among other things, spontaneous behavior. His research has spanned communication practices of the mentally disturbed, families, chimps and film audiences. As a consultant to the U.S. Government, he traveled the world advising diplomats on “what sells” in international negotiations. His forthcoming book is titled: “The Design of Attachment: Enduring Principles that Bond People to Products, Ideas and Performance.”
