Custom Insights, Not General Laws, is what you need.

Chapter of the upcoming book "Marketing, Fast and Slow"

“Mere Exposures” is probably the first findings of early Neuroscience from the 1960s. Simply nurturing memory structures of a brand of any kind is building a brand. The phenomenon behind also known as the “familiarity effect” has been proven since then countless times. Things we know, feel safer, deliver a trustworthy feeling. When brands change packaging, we always see a negative effect even if the design is better suited long-term.

The contrarian effect is the “newness” factor. Everything that is new creates some kind of alertness. It sparks curiosity and releases dopamine. Marketers use this for ages by highlight even marginal product changes as being “new”.

Those two contradicting effects raise an important question, that I like to answer now: what’s the right tradeoff between contradicting neuroscientific findings.

The young Andrew Ehrenberg was an outsider in advertising. As mathematician he looked at advertising from the layman’s perspective. He felt what common people chat behind closed doors: Customers of consumer goods are rarely influenced by marketing messaging. What works is raw exposure itself. It creates mental memory structures that make all the difference.

Human don’t “love” brands nor do they develop loyalty because of advertising. Instead, people differ in their likelihood of buying something new. Those who are more likely are the once who are more likely to buy small brands. And because of their properties they switch more likely to other brands. The late majority -the laggards- are those who mainly buy well-known big brands and are therefore less likely to switch. That’s the reason why large brands have more loyal customers. Not because they provide a better “customer experience”, just because they own the mass market – which include the leggards.

All those (descriptive) phenomena’s have well been shown in many studies by Ehrenberg and the researchers that continue his work at Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

They are a consequence of the familiarity and the newness effect with a special addition: each person has their own propensity to lean towards familiarity or newness.

And it gets more complicated.

Certain situations in consumers’ lives are linked to purchasing a product category. The morning is associated with breakfast and when you are hungry in the morning your intuition gives you the options to solve that “problem”. Creating subconscious associations between your brand and the situation increases the change, customers will consider buying you. If McDonalds is not associated with breakfast, you don’t notice the logo on the sidelines. Coca cola is advertising heavily its bottles next to a meal. Whenever you sit in the restaurant and the waiter asks you what you want to drink, most of us don’t care that much. The most associated answer may win in that moment.

Category Entry Points can be something virtual like certain thoughts. The thought after fear of financial risks can be associated with insurance products. But this association is not a logical one. Its like you think a song and without thinking you know how to sing along. It’s automatic.

The question now is: what are the relevant situations and thoughts you want your brand to be associated with?

But there is another question you may ask: What is the category you want your brand or product to be associated with. A category is a mental model about a group of products that deliver similar values and functionalities.

When a chocolate brand introduces a Waffles product, it has the chance to associate it with pralines, patisserie or waffles. When Segway introduced its vehicle, they decided to build their own category. Creating your own category brings you a unique selling proposition. But prospective customers have a hard time understanding “what it is”. That’s the value of a category – it’s a prepackaged understanding on what the product is. It delivers familiarity on the expense of newness.

But a “category” is not even an objective level of abstraction. Think of beer. There are craft beer, Pilsner, lager, and many more.

Lets take the brand Corona. Its technically a lager. But marketing sets it into a “Mexican beach” use case with a lime on it. Recently, I saw at LIDL how the retailer designed their own private label imitating the Corona brand. Everyone can see it’s not Corona. Still, you think “mmh, it probably tastes like Corona”. This means, Corona has created a sub-category of its own. This can be done in trillions of ways making it impossible to exactly define “categories”. (That’s one of the main limitations of Ehrenberg-Bass Insitutes research.)

Neuroscience gives us more findings that make everything even a bit more complex. It has found that information does not simply flow forward thru our brain – perception > processing > decision. Instead, our perception itself is driven and guided by our implicit goals.

Food ads are recognized and get attention when the person is hungry.

At a cocktail party, you hear your name across a crowded room, because it is your implicit goal to connect and to learn what others therefore think about you

Customers typically focus attention on faces – an implicit socializing goal. That is what eye tracking finds all the time. Now AI learned this eye tracking data and misses the point when it comes to dog advertising. Dog owners are attracted by dog faces even more than human faces.

These algorithms may get 93% right, but for some products it’s probably 93% wrong.

Why? Because the implicit goals of customers vary. They may be situational, context dependent, cultural or a result of zeitgeist.

What do we learn from all this?

Neuroscience opened us a new way of thinking. It enables us to get rid of AIDA and over-rationalization. It enables us to see more clearly.

But we need to realize that the world and the consumer are too complex, to simply pull out some ground truth described in Neuroscience text books.

As described, because humans are complex, those findings even contradict at times.

What brands need to thrive is their own custom research on why customers buy their products and services.

Neuroscience may provide the “body” of understanding. But research provides the “Blood” flowing thru this body.

Advice without own research is like a body with stale blood.

It might read like common sense, but it’s probably the most underleveraged activity in marketing teams.

We love to rely on expert judgment (mostly just opinions) and feel well equipped after reading a great Marketing or Neuroscience book. But that’s just a “body”.

What you need is “blood”. You need your custom blood with the right “blood type”, no bacterial contamination, right Hb-level, right blood characteristics, no plasma anti-bodies, temperature or amount.

The key scientific activities are not executed in universities. They research the frameworks. What really works for you in your case is the task of each brand. Therefore, it can also be a key source of a competitive edge.

Customers are not simple robots. Once you read the manual, you know all about the robot. Instead, customers or complex, adapting into a changing world.

Understand the framework but research your brand’s case.

That’s how you 10x impact.

p.s. if you want to go deeper, I recommend a live masterclass we run in April 2026 in Cologne. Here are all the details https://masterclass.supra.consulting/