Branding Between the Ears summary

Introduction

Branding Between the Ears by Sandeep Dayal Effective branding works by understanding how consumers' brains form associations, process emotions, and make buying decisions. Are you throwing everything you've got at branding, but can't seem to translate your efforts into hard sales? Perhaps you're spending big on advertising, only to find that consumers can't tell your brand apart from all the rest. If all this sounds familiar, this book, Branding Between the Ears, by Sandeep Dayal, is here to help.

You'll discover why most of what you've been told about branding is wrong. We'll unpick the myths and half-truths surrounding marketing. We'll replace them with solid scientific insights into how the brain works when it makes buying decisions. Packed with the latest research into consumer psychology, this is your introduction to branding that gets results.

Balancing Emotion and Branding

Balancing Emotion and Branding. What is it that makes an ad effective? A lot of times, what we think will work actually ends up sabotaging what we're trying to do. This includes an idea that feels sensible or a classic advertising strategy.

Here's an example. The advertisers working for the arthritis drug Enbrel thought they'd found a great strategy. Their TV ad had highlighted the biggest danger of leaving arthritis untreated. They showed this adorable little boy telling his young mother that he was afraid for her.

He feared she'd end up in a wheelchair if she kept ignoring her arthritis symptoms. He's confused, he's scared, and he's worried about the person he loves most. The ad then told viewers how people with arthritis could avoid that fate by taking their medication. The advertisers did this because they knew people are more likely to remember something if it triggers their emotions.

But when the whole thing aired, they noticed a problem. While people remembered the ad itself, no one remembered the brand. People do remember things more when their emotions are triggered, but that's not the whole story. When people have an emotionally charged experience, they're more likely to remember the central element of the experience.

But they're also more likely to forget any peripheral information surrounding that experience. This is the caveat we have to keep in mind here. In the case of this Enbrel ad, the peripheral information was the brand itself. The problem was that viewers were so busy with their emotional experience.

The overall message to buy the arthritis medication didn't get through. This little debacle shows why it's so important to balance an ad's emotional content with its branding message. And that's a balance that Steve Jobs, famous founder of Apple, understood really well. In the early 2000s, Apple shot hundreds of ads for the Apple Mac.

But only a handful of them ended up airing. And it's interesting because the ads that didn't make the cut were actually the funniest. They depicted this ongoing battle between an uptight PC user and a laid-back, cool Mac user. Fun, catchy, cute.

But Jobs somehow knew viewers would be so busy laughing at the ad's characters. They'd end up paying little attention to the overall message to buy the computer.