Our personal, worldly experiences are very much an outcome of how our brain individaullay interprets the various stimuli that we’re subjected to every minute of every day.
If I take a seat outside a beach café, I’ll view the sea, maybe hear seagulls in the air and experience a breeze on my face.
It seems obvious that I am experiencing the physical world around me and that it’s pouring itself into my mind through my senses.
But that isn’t what is happening. The light waves that arrived at my eyes and the sound waves that stimulated my ears, the pressure waves that enabled me to sense the breeze don’t arrive fully defined, they were just ambiguous, sensory stimuli.
So my brain has the task of interpreting all of these sensory signals and identifying their source and deducing what they mean.
This is the process of perception – it’s a creative act of interpretation in which our brain utilises its knowledge about the way the world is perceived by us, to determine what has caused these sensory signals and through this process enable us to consciously perceive and experience the world around us.
The brain does this the through prior knowledge that it has gained through our lifetime and uses its understanding about the structure of the world and what’s out there to interpret the sensory signals correctly. This prior knowledge is built deep into the structure of our brain and has been with us since primeval times.
As everyone has different lifetime experiences, the interpretation of life events is very much a personal thing. Whilst group experiences of an event will be broadly the same, there will be differences at a individual level and it is these differences that shape our preferences and choices and make us the person that we are.
For example, colour is a very familiar feature of our visual experience and gives our lives texture, beauty, meaning and differentiation – as do shapes.
As this perception process is different for each of us, we’re all going to experience our own interpretations of the same sensory data and create our own understanding and description of colours – this is the concept of inner diversity.
Inner diversity means that individual experiences of the same world are different and therefore the way each of us perceive everything in our life is different too.
Group learning, which starts during our school days, is very much responsible for the early shaping of ‘community’ knowledge and perceptions and these form the all-important brain bank foundation which allows us to define how we see the world around us from an early age.
And this is where the guidelines and foundations for our future understanding is created too.
But of course, this knowledge bank is not static – it is being expanded on a daily basis and every new experience and sensory stimulus alters our perceptions of everything around us by changing the reference points against which our understanding is based. This can also change the importance to us at any particular moment of time everything that we interact with, including products and brands.
Back in the 1950’s David Ogilvy, the grandfather of advertising very famously said ‘A brand exists in the mind of a consumer, or it doesn’t exist at all’.
And around the same time, Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon showed incredible insight by saying ‘In the factory we make cosmetics, in the store we sell hope.’
So here we have two succinct descriptions of the differences between the intangible attributes of a brand versus the tangible attributes of the product it represents.
But science is increasingly helping us understand how our innermost perceptions of the world around us can be shaped through consistency of experiences and thus, increase the relevance and importance to us as we go about our daily lives and of course, influencing our purchase decisions.
And part of this is understanding how our decision process changes in different circumstances and how we determine the important from the superfluous on an individual basis during this era of accelerated culture and super-editing.
Hence, simplicity and consistency of appropriate communication and expression gives brands the best chance of attracting larger audiences and achieving success.
The process of messaging repetition in the form of mass media advertising is well understood of course, but in the brand and communication diversity of the 21st century era, where brands are competing for the attention of audiences at relatively low volumes, creating a strong, common perception of a product and brand and what it stands for is vital. If a brand achieves that, it will achieve a greater perceived value than intrinsic value.
This is so important to understand in relation to creating successful brands – brands which become important to us on an individual level and provide value for time – the most precious commodity of all – rather than value for money.
Whilst commodity products make up the biggest percentage of our shopping repertoire, it is the brands we seek out and engage with that have values which match our own that differentiates each and everyone one of us and it is these brand choices that define who we are in terms of audience definition and behaviour.
By identifying and segmenting different consumer cohorts through their overall shopping behaviour we can identity those individuals that are most likely to resonate with a new product and brand.
And by forensically analysing this information we can build powerful pen portraits of target consumers based on their broad commonalities which facilitate the development of razor-sharp creative and communication strategies.