How the brain shops: Frozen in time

Marketing is about selling the next step. The best way to do this is to deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time.

To optimise this we need to understand how people make decisions.

Welcome to the series about how the brain shops where we will be exploring various parts of the brain, how it shops with evidence-based examples across different industries. All of these examples are driven by extensive Data Science testing, resulting in new knowledge, growth, and positive outcomes for our clients.

You can see all the series here. In the last article about Hunting and Foraging we investigated the human reward system and our inherent need for storytelling. Today, we are looking at experiences, and how the brain defines ‘self’, including a key insight about how experiences in our youth can lead you to unlock a huge segmentation opportunity.

Sydney Banks,

The pioneering gamechanger for Positive Psychology and becoming the best version of self.

Experiences are all around us, every minute of every day. How we perceive experiences is ever so liberating to understand as it is a cornerstone of the human condition and the life we choose to lead.

Choose to lead being key. Everything we do is a choice.

We all readily understand that in our day-to-day experience.

You choose to have a cup of tea or coffee.

You choose to have that awesome cupcake with your favourite hot drink.

You choose to get up early.

You choose to lie in.

You choose to go out.

You choose to stay in.

But what we do not always see is that the mind is preconditioned to choose how to take each experience as it comes. This type of choice in the mind manifests in diverse ways.

A bad mood can make a movie seem terrible vs a good mood can make the exact same movie seem wonderful.

Music from your youth has a stronger influence and bond in the mind than music you like that came later. Because of this, your mind is preconditioned to feel more and naturally be more attracted to music that is more ingrained in you from younger days vs the present day.

Whether it is movies, music, stories, what you eat, what you wear, who you spend time together with, it all ties back to the same thing in your mind: Perception.

Perception is reality

The brain’s job is to create a version of you, based on what you have experienced, how you want to take in that experience. If you see a glass as half empty or a glass as half full, your brain will follow that line of thinking into all experiences.

We are what we think. If we were not, we would be the robots and AI we fear, all thinking the same – a very vanilla experience. Thankfully, we are not. We are all unique.

Today, we are exploring a massive opportunity when it comes to segmentation and a key for seeing any age group in your marketplace; The 18–21-year-old mind.

I want you to consider what life was like when you were 18-21 years old.

• You had little to no responsibilities, mortgages, or long-term commitments.
• A degree of passion, frustration and at times, anger of being not understood as a generation, a group, a person. Everyone older than you was both ancient and out of touch.
• The music, style, movies, experiences were all for you and only understood by you and your tribe.

What a time in life that was (and if it still is that time for you, then I would stop reading this and go party!).

The development of the brain is important to understand how much this affects who you are right now and how you define yourself forever more.

• From the age of being born until we are seven, we form our behaviours.
• Then from 7-14 we build our habits.
• 14-21 is when our habits and behaviours fully lock in, we add the sexual and maturity part of the brain and off we go out into the world.

It is in the latter stages of the 18–21-year-old phase that our brains hunt how we can define our unique sense of self, how we are, what we are, why we are. It is a hectic time for the brain (long before we realise, we did not really have a clue what that was). This means that during that time the brain latches onto experiences much stronger and deeper than at any other time in life.

Does the music band/group/artist that you loved at that time, still light a fire and passion inside of you?

Or the haircuts, the styles, the slang, the way to dress, what is cool. Every key experience creates the unique feeling that allows us to express ourselves, especially of not being understood and being different to every generation before us.

Everyone has that moment in time because the brain needs us to feel a sense of security, to not freak out about this big wide world, to embrace that time as our own. If the brain did not latch on so hard over those few years, the transition from child to adult would be so much harder and riddled with more anxiety than it already was.

Where that leads us to is the power of relevance for any age group you want to give a better experience too. Even as a research exercise it can be enlightening, let alone how you can serve, attract, and convert people better with that knowledge.

We are what we experience. The more you can serve people with relevance of their 18–21-year-old mindset, the more you trigger their feelings of the best time of life, especially now that the brain has soaked that time with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.

The power of nostalgia is always a goldmine experience to focus on for increasing engagement. It is 100x better when using the 18–21-year-old mindset, we are frozen in time in the most awesome way. Sure, we adapt, we do not dress the same as we did, we do not speak the same, but our brains love that period of our lives more than any other. When those memories are triggered it showers us with joy and positive emotions every single time.

If you doubt this, take a sample of the people you see, even if you are not sure about their age: look at their shoes, haircut (very common with men!), and listen to their words. They all give you the insights into who they are and their preference in life from that same 18–21-year-old timespan.

If I know you, understand you, then I can represent what makes you want to hang out with me more. That is what segmentation’s real purpose is when it comes to shopping: to understand your audience and serve them relevance. The frozen mindset of our 18–21-year-old self-waiting to be triggered.

You can play the nostalgia game anytime you like and obtain actionable insights on your different segments from the Fountain of Knowledge.

If you want to know more about how the brain shops for your specific audiences, then you can have a discovery call.

Our discovery experience includes running some Data Science x Shopping Psychology algorithms in advance of the call for maximum relevance and insights about your marketplace and brand experience.