Well, I think you are crazy ...
Today Celeste Miller (re)joins the BR-ND Lab to drive the creation of an implicit association platform. Australian born Celeste, trained as a qualified social psychologist, will pursue amongst others implicit testing with software from Project Implicit and seek to incorporate this within our existing brand engagement platforms. Celeste has been a friend of BR-ND since 2010, when she did an internship in the same field. It's really nice to have her back!
Next to our efforts in the field of fMRI brainscanning, we wish to explore tools which can help with grasping implicit branding preferences. Why? Because two revelations from psychology are easy to understand about other people’s minds, yet so difficult to accept about one's own:
Most of mental life occurs outside of conscious awareness and conscious control
Thinking is in most cases not objective or rational
The brain uses shortcuts, heuristics, inferences, stereotypes, and expectations to help comprehend what happened before and predict what happens next. These mental processes can be useful and effective on one occasion and suboptimal or plain wrong on another. They can influence perception, judgment and behavior implicitly – without the person’s awareness or control. If this implicit cognition were merely a quirky feature of the brain's internal dialogue, with no implications for perceptions, judgments, or actions, then it would have little relevance for branding.
In our view, emotive branding is about activating meaning with the purpose to connect people for the better good. And most of our efforts will influence people at this very 'implicit' level.
Join us in welcoming Celeste and we will keep you posted on progress!
