A guide to understanding how brands influence us

Brands spend more than $450 billion each year to influence us. They wouldn’t spend that kind of money unless they knew something that we don’t know. In working with and studying more than 500 of these brands, including AT&T, Walmart, Advil, Ford, Sony, and Gillette, I was able to learn their secrets, which I am sharing in this article.

Brand secrets have taught us lessons that can be easily applied to both our professional and personal lives. Brands are not trying to influence a person. They are trying to influence the mind, so they take the time to study how the mind functions, makes decisions, and how it can be most predictably influenced. Brands are not trying to meet a person’s needs; rather, they are trying to meet their wants. You must understand their wants in order to influence someone to your way of thinking.

You may know a person’s wants, but that is not enough to get them to change their mind. Brands have identified tactics of change that work in sync with how our brain learns and seeks to satisfy our wants. Brands have been able to identify what consumers want to feel and I’ve broken down each emotion and how that feeling connects to particular brand secrets.

1. Safe and secure: This want is reinforced both through the physical structure of the brain and our physical environment, making it one of the strongest motivating forces in our lives. The amygdale is an area of the brain whose primary purpose is to protect us — think of it as a built-in survival mechanism. It fires up whenever we sense fear or danger, or that things are not safe or secure. Brand examples: Volvo, On Star, Allstate, ADP, Johnson & Johnson, Geico.

2. Comfortable: We all want to feel comfortable. We want to feel good, relaxed — we want it to be easy. We are attracted to what makes us feel good, and this is often what is most comfortable and easy. Brand examples: Cracker Barrel restaurants, Godiva, Rockport.

3. Cared for and connected to others: We all want to feel that someone cares for us, that we have friends, that people want to know us, and that they enjoy our company. Humans are genetically predisposed to want to be together, connected. It’s one of our evolutionary traits. Brand examples: Twitter, Facebook, Eclipse, Pizza Hut, Budweiser,
Olive Garden.

4. Affectionately desired by others: Some believe that all human motivation comes down to wanting to be affectionately desired by another. Freud popularized this concept in pitting the id against the superego and ego. Brand examples: Michelob Ultra, Viagra, Axe, Cadillac, Old Spice, Victoria Secret.

5. Free to do what we want: The desire to be free has been a guiding principle of human kind for the past 200,000 years. Societies have banned together to ensure their ability to remain free. The desire to be free is such a dominant human want that, time after time, we have given our very lives to satisfy it. Brand examples: MasterCard, Southwest, Nutrisystem, NCL, Harley Davidson, Fidelity, Citi.

6. To grow and become more: From birth, our brain is trained to learn and grow. Think of everything that we learn, often through our mother, with respect to feeding, crawling, walking, talking, and hand-eye coordination. We do not come programmed with these skills as we begin as a blank slate. Yet within the span of five years, we are able to perform without assistance many of the skills we will utilize throughout our lifetime. Our mind is constantly growing and striving to become more. Brand examples: Monster, Kindle, Sony Playstation, Microsoft, Phoenix University, Bally, Kaplan.

7. To serve others and give back: Sixty-one million people performed 8.1 billion hours of service last year. Why? Our first teachers, those who initially trained our minds, were our parents. Those early memories of a mother serving our every need, unselfishly giving to their child to protect, care, and nurture, are deeply engrained in our minds and cause us to want to serve others and give back. Brand examples: Prius, Live Strong, Timberland, Newman’s Own, Make a Wish, Susan G. Komen.

8. Surprised and excited: The amount of stimuli that our senses can process throughout the course of a day is remarkable. While the vast majority of these stimuli are filtered by our perceptual register, what almost always gets through is what surprises and excites us. Strong emotions that could either cause potential ecstasy or anxiety are the first things that get our attention. Brand examples: Red Bull, Las Vegas tourism, Disney, Debeers.

9. That there is a higher purpose: As members of the human race, we all have two very significant things in common. First, we were borne by a woman. Second, we will all die. Ninety percent of us identify with a particular religion, believe in a God and that when we die there is something more. We deeply want to believe that there is a higher purpose, that there is something beyond us, beyond our lives. This is one of our most important wants. Brand examples: U.S. Marines, Purpose Driven Life, Bessemer Trust, Joel Osteen.

10. That I matter: This is human kind’s greatest want. That I matter. I am worthy of your attention, your affection, and your love. It is our evolutionary trait, our point of difference. If we didn’t matter, we wouldn’t survive. This is our point of difference when compared to any other living creature on the planet. There is not another species whose survival so depends on a caregiver as long as does a human being. Brand examples: American Express, Lexus, Rolex, Starbucks.

Brands have clearly mastered how to truly understand the consumer psyche from the basic levels of wants and needs. It’s through these lessons that we’ve learned brand secrets that arm marketers with the tools they need to target exactly what consumers want.

Brian Martin is CEO of Brand Connections, a marketing and media company focused on reaching consumers in vacation, travel, recreation, and entertainment environments.