Consumers had everything they needed, and so the companies came up with a great idea.

Persuade people that they need more things.

Even things they didn't really know they needed.

And nowadays, companies are studying your brain to get you to keep buying more stuff.

This is called neuromarketing and neuromarketing is like marketing on steroids.

Companies know us better than we know ourselves.

The brand exists nowhere else but in the mind of the consumers.

We're going to tell you how companies are getting into your head.

In the 1950s, a clever marketer shocked the world with an astonishing experiment.

He flashed the messages, drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn on a cinema screen, too briefly for the audience to even notice.

He claimed this had people rushing to the counters in droves to buy Coke and popcorn.

If this story sounds too good to be true, then that's because it is.

Thankfully, we're not that easy to brainwash.

Turned out it was all BS.

He made that up.

There's no such thing as a brain spy button.

This is Prince Guman, a marketing professional.

He and neuroscientist Matt Johnson wrote a book on how companies tailor their marketing to our brains.

So the good thing is, we're not mindless shopping zombies.

But we do make a lot of our decisions subconsciously.

And that's where neuromarketing comes in.

Companies are trying to better understand how our brain works to figure out what we really want.

Traditional marketing studies work like this.

Someone will ask me, do you want an apple or do you want a chocolate bar?

And I'd say, I of course want the apple.

But do I really want the apple?

So we feel as if we're in control.

We feel as if we're the author of our decisions and we're thinking through these things very rationally.

But study after study after study shows that we are extremely irrational and that we're, generally speaking, pretty unaware of the full range of factors which ultimately inform and sometimes actually decide the different behaviors and paths that we take.

In short, we don't always know what we want.

We don't know if we actually want the apple or if we prefer the chocolate bar.

But our brain doesn't lie.

And that's why neuromarketers have adopted a range of technologies in their marketing studies to see what's happening under the hood, inside consumers' brains.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalograms measure activity in the brain.

Eye tracking shows where we direct our attention and heart rate and skin conductance show what we find exciting.

For better or worse, people are complex and the brain is really complex.

Uma Kamaka is a scholar whose research revolves around how we make decisions.

What neuroscience does is it gives us access to some of these emotional elements or these elements that might not be fully conscious and tells us a little bit more about some of the things that might also be contributing to people's experiences and choices.

Take Cheetos, for example.

When its parent company Frito-Lay asked consumers how they felt about the brand, many said, well, it's a bit of a kid's snack.

But when they looked at their brains, it turned out people got a real kick out of getting their fingers messy with this orange dust that they're covered in.

It is fun.

There was something subversive about that orange dust on your fingers.

There was something a little unusual about it.

And people kind of enjoyed it, even though it was not that respectable.

You know, other people are trying to do their laundry, too.

Frito-Lay took these findings and built an entire ad campaign around this feeling of subversive pleasure.

Those are her whites in the dryer.

It became a huge success.

More and more businesses are investing in this type of research, most of which is happening in secret.

Through neuroscience, but also with the help of psychology and behavioral economics, they get a pretty good idea of what makes us tick.

And they use this knowledge to get us to buy more of their stuff.

Now I'm going to give you four examples of this that you've probably seen in your everyday life.

One, they wear you down.

Our brain operates in two different thinking modes.

There's what's called system one, which is fast, unconscious and automatic.

And then there's system two, which is deliberate and conscious, but takes a lot of effort.

If I ask you, what is your name?

System one will immediately have an answer to that question.

But if I ask you, what is 23 times 48, you're going to have to switch to system two.

This requires effort.

Now imagine you're going grocery shopping.

You have to find your way around the different aisles and make loads of decisions in a short amount of time.

When you finally get to the checkout counter, you're tired.

One way in which you can get somebody to be more system one oriented is actually through wearing them down.

So system two, very resource intensive, requires a lot of metabolic resources.

When we're tired, when we're malnourished, we're much more likely to go with a much more impulsive system one response.

And that's why right at the end of your shopping trip, retailers tempt you with loads and loads of sugary snacks that you might just pick up at the very last moment.

Shopping malls exploit the same situation.

They're confusing, they're overwhelming, they're quite frankly exhausting, so you're more prone to spend money on something you might not even need.

Two, they tell you what the right price is.

Let's say you walk into a store and you see a bottle of wine for, I don't know, let's say $15.

Your brain doesn't really know if this is a lot or if this is not a lot.

So it's immediately starting to look for some context.

Typically, people don't really have a sense of price, like they don't really know how much wine should cost or what's the right price for wine.

This is Moran Cerf, a computer hacker turned neuroscientist and business professor.

The people create their kind of impressions of the price range, not by knowledge, by information, but rather by kind of sampling reality.

And the store will happily give your brain a reality to latch on to, by placing a second bottle next to it costing $50.

Now your brain thinks, $15, that's actually a pretty good deal, so it's very likely you're going to buy this bottle.

Our brains are like ships.

We're looking for places to anchor, right?

And adding any sort of context or understanding of value, having an anchor helps.

Three, they keep you on the treadmill.

Another quirk of our brain that brands are using is that it's constantly seeking pleasure.

And the keyword here is seeking.

Once you're experiencing a sort of thing that you wanted, you don't just get to bask in that pure pleasure for a long time.

It's not the type of emotion which is enduring over time.

And that's a very, very good thing for brands.

Because pleasure is so fleeting, brands keep sending us to what's called the hedonic treadmill.

The iPhone 6, the iPhone 6s, this is iPhone 7, iPhone 11, iPhone 12.

Let's say you buy iPhone 8.

It's a brand new physical design and you're loving it.

And just like clockwork, 12 months later, 8s comes out.

Whatever pleasure you got from achieving and purchasing, the iPhone is now immediately gone.

And now you're looking to, again, jump on the hedonic treadmill and chase the next pleasure.

Four, they hide little nudges in plain sight.

So you remember that cinema story from the beginning?

Subliminal marketing messages like this, so things that we can't pick up unconsciously, are actually illegal in most countries.

But a few companies must have thought, "Well, why don't we just hide them in plain sight?"

Check out this ad from KFC.

See anything unusual?

Well, look again.

There's an actual dollar bill photoshopped into the burger, which happens to cost one dollar.

And check out this can.

Coca-Cola made it look like it's smiling to tie in with its brand image of happiness.

And in literally every ad for watches, the time is set to 10 past 10.

Because that makes it look like the watch is smiling at you.

These types of subtle hints are called primers.

So I would say right now, controversial, but the priming works.

That said, we still teach that in school, in business school, as kind of a mechanism people should be aware of, because it's easy to implement.

So for the small chance that it does work, why not try it if you're trying to kind of sell something?

So if you see a 1010 watch, you know, you're not compelled by some physical force to go out and do everything you can to buy it.

But if you're already feeling like buying a watch, or maybe you're already favorable towards the brand, you know, that additional data point is going to push you maybe a little bit further.

And this is not limited to visual triggers.

An experiment showed that if a wine store plays French music, customers buy more French wine.

And if it plays German music, they buy more German wine.

A lot of this stuff is hiding in archives for companies, and it is in their best interest not to reveal it.

But we would be silly to think that this isn't part of the experiential design that companies are creating to better engage with their consumers.

So where does all this leave us?

Are we ultimately just puppets without a will of our own buying whatever corporations throw away?

Or do we have a choice?

Total mindless behavior is rare.

Total control is also rare.

And in between, there's a wide gray area.

And we can move the needle between whether to make choices that are very informed and very kind of thorough, or very impulsive and not too thorough.

If you like something, that's going to be the most important determinant of whether or not you choose to spend money on it, or your time on it, or your resources in general on it.

And that speaks a lot to the power that we have as consumers and individuals.

Now, neuromarketing is a very powerful tool.

It gives companies access to something that even we don't have access to most of the time, our subconscious.

But just knowing that and knowing how our brain works can already help us make better decisions.

Have you ever come across any of the things we've shown you in the video?

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