It's all in your head.

Just like Freud believed, Rapaille believes that many of our actions and decisions are rooted in subconscious associations with particular words, products, emotions, and feelings (Minus the whole sex and anal aspect). According to Rapaille, people formulate these subconscious associations at a very early age, or whenever they are first exposed to the stimulus. Neurologically, this makes sense to me because your brain is always forming connections within itself, linking different parts of the brains with different neurons and synapses as stimuli are introduced. These associations stay engrained in your brain permanently and cannot unlink themselves. I’ve always thought that combining science, whether it is psychology, neurology, or whatever, with marketing and decision making would prove to be an effective combination. I don’t understand why it’s not utilized more frequently than it is, but then again, the process of integrating technical science into marketing research can be lengthy and costly.

Three different levels of the brain affect the way humans think, react, and make decisions. The cortex governs our intelligence and logical functions – that is, everything that we rationally and consciously do. The limbic system controls our emotions and includes structures that help us form spatial relations, long term memory, and carry out autonomic functions such as hunger, thirst, and sexual arousal. The final system that controls how we operate is probably the oldest element of the evolution of our brain: the reptilian brain. True to the name, the reptilian brain controls our most basic instincts – the need to eat, to find shelter, to reproduce, and in general, the need to survive. So what does this have to do with marketing? Well, while humans may be the most evolved (if you do believe in evolution) and rationally capable animals… we are still just those… animals. Not all of our actions are guided by rational thought, or even by emotion. Our brains are so complex and utilize so many different structures and parts that it is hard to say what governs our actual decision making. For example, say someone asks why I prefer Kraft cheese over Sargento cheese. My rational answer is that the taste is better. While this may be a perfectly warranted and accurate response, the real reason that drives the purpose might be much deeper than this. It may reside in my emotions, my subconscious, or even a combination of the two. The better question to ask is: Why do I prefer the taste? While Rapaille’s point is that there is a subconscious and often logically irrational buzz word that ultimately affects the purchase decision, I am trying to illustrate that his conjectures definitely have some merit from a physiological standpoint.

Once I understood the rationale behind his research, I found the experiments he conducted to be ingenious. First, get everybody on the same page and in the same train of thought by exposing the consistency in people’s logical thought process. Then, take away that comfort of consistency in challenging people to illustrate a point in a way that they are not used to thinking (explaining it to a 5 year old). Finally, minimize cortex stimulation in order to amplify the use of the limbic as well as reptilian systems of the brain. It appears that Rapaille has done some amazing research in this field, and I think other people can take a hint from his successes. Although let’s not get carried away in all of this talk about the subconscious and forget what makes humans human… our rationale.