Brands & The Brain: How to use Neuroscience To Create Impactful Brands.

There are two ways of wealth creation. One is the short term volume approach and the other is value based long term investment approach. Brands create long term value. India’s Gem & Jewellery sector has created wealth based on its manufacturing prowess and thus adopted the former approach. I recommend this book to everyone as it has a wonderful framework of Brand Operating Priciples or BOPs that help understand the concept of Brands and how they create value.

neuron system in the brain is thought to drive this behaviour from a very early age. Powerful brands create their own self-reinforcing cycle through imitation. Imitation makes us feel secure. It is one of the bases of influencer marketing. Imitating a key influencer whom we like by using the same brand or the brand that they endorse increases serotonin and oxytocin. We feel part of a collective.

Arvind Sahay is professor of marketing and international business; Prof. M.N. Vora Chair in marketing and entrepreneurship; chair, India Gold Policy Centre; chair, marketing area; and chair, NSE Centre for Behavioral Science at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Prof. Sahay completed his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin. He obtained his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and he also holds a degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

We live in the digital age where social media is playing an important role in our lives. Prof. Arvind Sahay’s Brain Operating Principle # 5 explains how and why social media works and why inflencer marketing works. Here are the edited excerpts: Brain Operating Principle #5 (BOP#5) Human brains are designed to mirror, to conform socially with others, to interact with people, animals, objects around us. We tend to do what others around us are doing.We imitate. We copy. We are wired to connect—to humans, to objects, to machines and also to brands. The mirror

A chance incident during an experiment led scientists to the discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of monkeys. A monkey that was observing another monkey eat a banana started to show increased activity in the F5 area of its brain, the same area that the other monkey was using to actually eat! The neurons in the F5 area of the brain of the monkey watching the other monkey eat were called mirror neurons. Humans are thought to have a mirror neuron system (MNS) rather than localized mirror neurons. These neurons, speculated to be present in the human inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe, fire up both when we see an individual carrying out an action and when we carry out the same action. Although the MNS is not fully understood, it is theorized that it is this system that enables us to understand others’ intentions, learn actions, empathize, imitate (even unconsciously) and mimic actions. Some even suggest that it is engaged in self-awareness and consciousness. Consider a typical social scenario. The popularity of Facebook and Instagram had everyone flocking to these platforms, sharing similar kinds of photos and posts, and holding mundane and trivial conversations, often with semi-strangers. The now-normal standards of social media have been achieved through acts of mimicry and a very human instinct to try and fit in. The MNS pushed us to conform with the established social standards and to ‘imitate’ the actions of friends by opening a social media account and posting content that was very similar to that of the people connected to us through the account. Facebook doesn’t come with instructions about the content we need to post, and yet, most of us don’t take chances lest we stand out in the crowd and appear ‘non-conformist’.