The Neuromarketing Matrix by Professor Morpheus
Photo by Comfreak, Pixabay
You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life—that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Do you want to know what it is?
These words came from Morpheus in The Matrix. While he was describing the fictional world of Matrix, he might as well be describing the consumer world of today.
Consumerism truly is all around us, and we are all part of it. The consumer world has a life-long relationship with our psychology and, despite each of us being consumers, we are blind to it.
The brand logos you see, the ads you scroll down your newsfeed, the TV commercials, the products you use on a daily basis - these are only the outermost, visible layer of the consumer world. There is a deeper, hidden layer that holds the architecture of the consumer world designed for our brains.
This is the world of consumer neuroscience (sometimes called neuromarketing), and ironically, consumers aren’t educated on it. As Ygritte would say, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
Start by identifying the players in the neuromarketing matrix. First, there is the external consumer world all around us. Next, there’s the brain – the beautiful, incredibly complex, and ultimately mysterious eight-pound organ in our skulls. And lastly, there’s you.
Think of consumer behavior like sailing. First, there’s the sailboat. It is a giant, complicated machine with its own set of rules and mechanisms. A sailboat is a sum of its parts, its hull, its rudder, its sails, and its mast.
Next, there’s the sailboat’s inseparable environment, the open sea, where it gets pushed and pulled by the winds and the tides responsible for both smooth sailing and deadly storms. Lastly, there’s the sailor. Without the sailor, a sailboat is about as meaningful as a unicorn without a horn, a hammer without a handle. They define one another.
From hull to the helm, the sailor knows the boat and its physical limits intimately. The sailor is fluent in the sailboat’s environment as the sea is his home too. He combines his knowledge of the wind and the sea with his knowledge of the sailboat to safely navigate both himself and the sailboat from point A to Z. Their lives combine into one.
As a consumer, the sailboat is your brain - a complex, multi-part organ with its own set of rules, limits, and biases. Its environment is one of consumption where the act of buying is an inseparable part of life. The environment of consumption constantly jerks on the mechanisms of the brain. And finally, there is you, the person aboard the sailboat.
The question is, are you a sailor or a passenger? Chances are, a passenger. In a sense, PopNeuro.com is about learning to sail. The reason why PopNeuro.com exists is to reveal consumer neuroscience to non-marketers, to you. Red or blue pill, there is no way out of the consumer matrix. Are you ready to see how far the rabbit hole goes?
What’s Next?
Dive into the fascinating intersection of psychology and marketing and how to use psychological biases in marketing strategy.