How The Human Brain Makes Decisions
Valuable information that all marketers need to know

As we progress throughout our daily lives, we are constantly bombarded with advertising everywhere we look. The breakfast cereal box, bill boards, neon signs, trucks on the highway, the radio, newspapers, magazines, TV, the internet, etc., etc., etc. In a very short time we realize that even though it's all around us, we really don't see any of it. Amazing isn't it?

We run through our daily lives on auto-pilot. Don't we? We are creatures of our own routines. The repetitive things that you do everyday no longer require you to think about actually doing them because of the fact that you do them every single day. How many times have you arrived at the parking lot where you work and realize that you don't remember anything between the time you left home and that very instant you arrived at work? Pretty scary huh? This major part of your day has become so routine that you can completely daydream and your brain still knows how to get you to work safely. Unless of course something happens to interrupt your auto-pilot state of mind.

Now let's think about this for a moment. So what we just discovered is that we are (at times) in a state of auto-pilot as we go throughout the day. So it must be up to the marketer to interrupt this state of mind and get us to pay attention to their ad. The good marketer knows how to do this by tapping into the human psyche.

The Reticular Activator and how it works:

There is a portion of our brain that is constantly on the look out (24/7/365) for things that are familiar or dangerous or problematic. It's called the reticular activator and it never sleeps. A common example is a mother who hears her baby cry in the middle of the night when she is sound asleep. The sound of the baby indicates a potential problem so the reticular activator wakes the mother to tend to the baby.

This is the very same principle that good advertising is based on. The marketer studies the demographic of the target audience and creates a powerful headline that "interrupts" the consumer from their auto-pilot state of mind and makes them pay attention. Without this "interruption," all advertising simply looks alike.

Traditional advertising agencies use the C&R method (creativity and repetition) to build brand awareness and recognition. The problem with this method is that it takes too long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising to accomplish branding.

The entrepreneur and internet marketer who doesn't have the time and budget to build a brand is anxious for another method of getting prospects to pay attention. They need to accomplish this by using their knowledge of the human brain and creating powerful headlines (subject lines) that penetrate the reticular activator and cause a reaction. So their headlines need to be based on something that is familiar, dangerous, problematic or a combination of any two.

So when you are thinking of creating some powerful headlines or subject lines, remember these three words; familiar, dangerous and problematic. Base your interrupt on issues surrounding them and you can't go wrong.

by Joe Cavell - November 3, 2007

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