Think about the last time you bought something. Do you know why you chose that particular product or brand? Probably not. You can rationalise with hindsight, but the fact is our brain makes these decisions without us really thinking about it. This is why the most successful brands appeal to customers on the basis of emotional associations, images and experiences rather than just on the back of their product specifications. As one Harley Davidson executive describes it in one of this book’s convention-shattering case studies: “We don’t sell motorbikes. What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him”.

Branding with Brains exposes the hard, scientific truth about why customers choose certain brands over others. It gives you the three most powerful laws of branding to make sure your brand is the first in your customers’ minds, every time they buy.

What has neuroscience got to do with branding? The link may not be immediately obvious, but the fact is, our brains select brands in much the same way that Google selects websites. So, just as web marketers play on Google’s algorithm to make sure their site appears as high up the search list as possible, brand marketers should play on the brain’s algorithm to make sure their brand is at the top of their customers’ minds at the moment they choose which brand to buy.

This ground-breaking new book brings the proven effects of hard science to the creative practice of branding. It shows you how to harness this powerful combination to your own advantage by helping you understand how customers’ brains work when they choose brands. A strong brand cannot be build effectively without taking into account the laws of the brain – which, as this book shows, really exist and can be scientifically proven to work. Once you know this, you can apply the familiar branding laws of relevance, coherence and participation more precisely, more confidently and to much greater effect. This means your brand will have a much greater chance of being chosen by customers than your competitors’ brands.

Branding with Brainsshatters the conventional approach to branding, which is based on hunches and intuition, by uncovering the hard, scientific truth about why customers choose some brands over others. Insights into company stories, from Leica to Innocent Drinks, from Starbucks to Schipol International Airport, give you the fascinating truth about how the processes that go on in our brain affect our decisions to buy a particular product or service. All in all, this breathtakingly radical new book from Tjaco Walvis presents a daringly different, state of the art approach to brand strategy that will help you build powerful brands more efficiently, more effectively and more reliably than ever before.

Branding really is all in the mind – and this book proves it!