Speaking of resolutions, I heard a great story on NPR by Radiolab this week, which basically says, if you’re prefrontal cortex is too busy with remembering things, you’re more likely to succumb to emotional reasoning and your willpower will fade; in the experiment they did, someone memorizing seven digits was twice as likely to choose cake over fruit for a snack than someone memorizing a two-digit number.

So that’s why I make stupid food choices: I’m thinking too hard about other stuff!

So what does this mean for marketers? Since we’re all running around with too much in our brains, employ emotional reasons to buy. That’s what good branding does—hits both our reasoning and our emotions with messages that speak to us whether we’re operating from one part of our brain or the other. And good luck saying no to that cake.

-Lynn Parker

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