There is an old saying about anticipation and desire that ‘The first bite is taken with the eye’. Not, please note, the brain.

Developmental psychologists tell us that the conscious, more ‘rational’ mind is both smaller and slower than the unconscious, more ‘emotional’ mind. The rational mind processes 40 bits of data per second, the emotional mind a dizzying 11bn bits per second. And most input into the emotional mind is accessed visually - hence the adage.

So emotional responses win out over rational ones: they are faster and stronger. This isn’t surprising from an evolutionary perspective. Fast, emotional, reflex responses are probably how early humans survived on the African savannah. If Man had relied on his rational brain alone, he would have taken so long to cogitate on whether a large shaggy tawny object was a lion or an unusually shaped bush that he would certainly have been eaten. As it is, humans developed a fast, instinctual ability to generalise: “Large-Shaggy-Tawny = RUN!”

In modern terms, the conscious mind deals with need whereas the unconscious mind deals with desire. Behavioural economists tell us that the most powerful purchase decisions are taken unconsciously: while the rational mind will construct a shopping list and will stay within it, it is the emotional mind that is open to and impulsively connects – falls in love with - a brand, a product, an experience – or a person!

Some of the most iconic brands – the ones that have created, or fundamentally changed, their categories – operate in this desire/love arena. Not all of them are major players – some of them barely dent the share of their global competitors – but they occupy a uniquely special place in consumers’ hearts. They span both consumer products but also services and ‘experiences’, and they have one thing in common: they are remembered, and they are loved.

In the FMCG sector, brands such as Ben & Jerry’s, the Jones Soda Company, innocent and Green & Blacks occupy this space; companies like Burton Snowboards created and defined their specific sports equipment category; within leisure and accommodation concepts such as Hôtels du Vin have gone beyond the mere provision of services and become destinations in themselves.

Many of these ionic brands have become icons simply because they have departed radically from their category norm. Gü, for example, break one of the first rules of packaging: instead of highlighting the product, their packs bear the brand name, an Aubrey Beardley-style masked face, and, on their website, statements such as ‘Pleasure Is Everything’. It is a brand that invites the consumer to fall in love with it. Similarly, Ben & Jerry’s invite consumers to fall in love – both with the product, but also with the history of the company and the ethos of the two founders. Both these brands combine two aspects: they are loved, and they are radical in concept and design. In the case of the Jones Soda Company, who invite consumers to send in their own photos to be judged by their employees for inclusion on the bottles, the relationship is as much with their employees as with the product itself. In doing so they also break a category rule: by permitting constant limited-edition labels, they ignore the need for consistency of pack presentation.

What is it that these innovative brands have in common?

• Almost by definition, they are radical: they break one or more ‘category norms’: they disobey convention and instead of following the rules, they create new rules that redefine their category and its visual and emotional language.
• They convey a sense of passion – about company, locale or product – and engender in their target a similar sense of love or connection with their brand.
• They usually have a ‘small is beautiful’, artisanal stance, even when they are a global operation
• They convey a sense of idealism and belief – either about their product or causes outside their core business
• They allow the individualistic, often quirky, personality of their founder visionaries to pervade everything they are seen to say and do
• The founders continue to personally intervene in product creation and refinement
• They have a ‘back story’ – whether the garage in which Wozniak and Jobs created their first Macintosh, or the gas station in which Ben & Jerry first set up
• They genuinely believe in two-way communication between themselves and their consumers, rather than just adding a ‘contact us’ button on their website
• Above all, they allow their brand to ‘take a stance’ and stand for a core value, even if it alienates some consumers. They do not try to be ‘all things to all’ – in being true to themselves they accept that not all the world will buy into their offer and values. They do not ask to be loved: in effect, they say “This is who we are and what we stand for: now judge for yourselves.”

It’s fair to say that these concepts could not easily have been created from within large companies. Could Unilever have created Ben & Jerry’s, or Cadbury’s Green & Black’s? Almost certainly not – and those brands’ continuing survival will depend on how ‘hands-on’ (or off) their parent companies decide to be.

It’s a fair bet that, if these brands had been forced through the mincer of qualitative and quantitative research, they would not have survived. They do survive because they are loved – not because they have been tested.

What prevents the large corporations from coming up with radical, ground-breaking brands that both defy convention and yet redefine their market and succeed? It comes back to our initial premise: that brands are seen, bought and loved through the emotional, unconscious part of the mind, rather than via a rational decision. Unfortunately, the larger the organisation, the more ‘rational’ it becomes, taking decisions deductively - from data gained - rather than inductively – from a deep personal involvement in the category, the consumer and above all the product.

We have to find ways of creating, positioning and designing brands that appeal to the instinctive mind – and that means working instinctively and intuitively. This does not mean that we throw away all the tools and techniques that we have developed over the years, but it does mean discarding some, and using others differently

Here are some, if not rules, at least some directions to explore.

• We must accept that for a brand to be loved, it needs not – and perhaps cannot – be ‘all things to all people’. It is love, not liking, that creates emotional, unconscious preference: it follows that it can be better to be deeply loved by part of the population, than slightly-liked by everyone. Don’t be tempted to write the ‘Dear Santa’ brief: ‘Dear Santa, please send me for Christmas a ruggedly-masculine brand that doesn’t alienate women – edgy and urban yet rooted in the English countryside, premium and exclusive but accessible to all…’ That brand will fail.
• Allow a brand to ‘stand for something.’ People respond to a clear set of values, even if they don’t always agree with them. Not everyone agrees with Richard Branson’s commercial philosophy but they love what he stands for.
• We must accept that people don’t know what they want – particularly when exploring truly innovative concepts for which consumers have no point of reference: we cannot ask respondents to come up with an iPad, or a Segway. We shouldn’t be asking them what they want – we should be using research to gain insight into consumer psychology and their emotional needs, and yield inspiration for innovative new products and brands that create strong emotions – love, security, desire, excitement, reward – in their audiences.
• Successful brands spread virally – both sideways through peer connections, and through trickle-down from early adopters. We can’t easily research ‘social effect’ through word-of-mouth, but creating it instinctively is a key part of a brand’s positioning.
• We must also accept that most successful brands do not have to explain themselves. They don’t have to say: “I am a yogurt”. They have to say “You’ll love me”. Gü would fail any comprehensibility test – it is far from clear what it is. But it evokes the product experience and provokes the emotional response: “I like it. I want it. What is it?”
• Allow the brand to disrupt the language of its category. Most radical successes break the conventions and create a new language of emotional promise.
• We should be prepared to use not the language of persuasion – to push a product towards its audience - but the language of love, which pulls a consumer towards the promised experience.

To sum up: modern business practice is built on logical deductive principles that derive from the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment and the science of the Industrial Revolution. 150 years on, the newer sciences of psychology and neuroscience are telling us that we are speaking in the wrong language. We are speaking the language of reason and persuasion when we should be speaking the language of love.

Image credit: Gü (Dragonfly)