Neuroplasticity and Brand-Switching

Lately, I’ve been considering the topic of brand loyalty and the way in which consumers tend to default to certain habitual choices – which is of great interest to the firm that seeks to retain customers, but something of a daunting prospect to those who wish to win customers away from existing providers.   A marketer charged with attracting customers to a new brand faces a difficult, but not impossible task or breaking the mind’s programming and then substituting a new routine.

Habits are often casually spoken of as being “hard-wired” into the mind – but this is a misstatement that breeds further misconceptions.  Primarily, the idea of hard-wiring assumes that habits cannot be broken, whereas experience has shown that they are breakable with some effort.   It’s likewise misrepresented that behavior literally reshapes the mind – which is entirely untrue.  There is no neurological proof that one human brain is different from another (except in cases of birth defects, injuries, or diseases that affect the organ) – behavior is the result of psychological programming, not physical wiring, and while it is difficult to change this programming, it is not impossible.

How the Mind is Programmed

First, consider how the brain becomes programmed in the first place: it is a process of trial and error.  A person faced with a problem does what seems sensible to address it.   If their attempt fails, they try something else.   If their attempt succeeds, their problem is solved and the procedure is flagged as “successful” in memory, to be referenced the next time the same problem is encountered.

There can be some argument that learning is gained from the external world – that a young child is taught to do certain things, or at least imitates what it sees without considering the way in which it functions.   This is true, but these external signals are merely inspiration for an attempt – nothing is really learned or believed until it is attempted and the outcome is seen.    As the mind develops, it begins to grasp things theoretically, and believes its own theories rather than accepting whatever is suggested or observed.   Even then, one does not learn from observation, but our observations encourage or discourage us from attempting certain actions.

In terms of consumer loyalty, consumers attempt to use a product to solve a problem.  It may be a product they have found for themselves or one that has been observed or suggested – this is incidental.  Whatever the source of inspiration, they attempt to use the product and are aware of whether it “worked” to solve their problem.  And if it worked, then they flag it in memory as “successful” and return to it the next time the same problem is encountered.

And this is the manner in which loyalty to a brand is formed: at some moment the brand provided a successful solution to a problem, and so the “success” switch was set and the brand was remembered.   And when this occurs an individual tends to cease exploring alternative methods to their problem – even if the solution they have found is less efficient or effective than other methods that have not been attempted, it satisfies the binary “succeed/fail” criterion.   And so they stick with it, it becomes habit, and they become loyal to both product and brand.

How the Mind is Reprogrammed

The reprograming of the mind works much the same way as its initial programming: an attempt is made, it fails, so some other action is attempted.   Only in this case, the first attempt is the habitual behavior: people do what they usually do until it doesn’t work, at which point they try something else – and if that works, it challenges the habit.

The concept of “challenging” a habit, rather than replacing it, is significant: people tend to defend habitual behaviors, even when their habit has failed and something else has worked, they see the second behavior as an alternative.  It is something that worked “this time” or something to be tried when the habitual behavior fails or when certain conditions exist – but for the most part they will go back to their original habit.   It may require several iterations for the original habit to be replaced by the new.

More often, however, both the new brand and the habitual brand pass the succeed/fail criterion – both brands succeed at solving the customer’s problem – and it then turns to more granular criteria.  Which of the two is better in terms of effectiveness and efficiency?   It is not sufficient for the new action to work, but it must work better than the habitual one.

Of course, there are individuals who are exceedingly pig-headed.  They will refuse to try anything else and will simple accept defeat when their original habit fails.   This comes from the psychological need for consistency and the need to be “right” in decisions that causes people to ignore alternatives to what they believe, even when it is obvious that their beliefs are wrong and the alternative is a better way.   This resistance to change exists to some degree in all individuals.  Because of this tendency, replacing a habitual brand with a new one is difficult.  

Eliciting a Change in Behavior

A brand change in the market can be entirely passive and require no effort on the part of the producer.   People are struggling with their existing solutions and “somehow” manage to learn about the new brand, try it on their own, and notice that there is a marked improvement in the outcome.   This is a slow process, but it is also highly effective in that people put the greatest faith in things that they discover for themselves.

But to be active in eliciting a brand change, a challenging brand must promote itself.  It must make people aware that it exists and convince them that it is worth trying because it is better (more effective or efficient) than their current brand preference.   This is difficult to do because an individual’s personal experience of using their existing brand is more credible than anyone else’s claims that the new brand will be better.

But even that is only the beginning – the new brand may become an alternative that the prospect is willing to try, but it will not replace the existing brand unless the claims hold true when they give it a trial.  And this is where many new brands fail, particularly in commoditized markets: they are in reality no better than the currently preferred brand, and when customers discover this they return to their habit.

So the pathway to success is to provide a solution that is actually better, promote its superiority to prospects, and then deliver on those promises.    It can also be helpful to reduce the cost of acquisition (being cheaper or easier to obtain), but again, this is only effective in creating a brand-switch if the new product passes the success/fail test and is evaluated to be better than the existing brand.

Further Considerations

My sense is that this consideration of habituation and neuroplasticity is a bit too high-level to be of practical use – but should at least point marketers in the right direction for finding a solution to the problem of customer loyalty to other brands, as well as creating loyalty to the new brand once the prospect has been convinced to attempt it as a solution to their problem.

The fundamental process of habituation and breaking habituation are the same, and there are a number of significant questions that are useful in discovering a method to win and retain customers:

• What problem is the customer trying to solve?
• Does a given brand (yours or another) actually solve it?
• Is the solution effective in solving the problem?
• Is the solution efficient in the effort required to use it?
• Does the customer recognize and value the ways in which it is more effective or efficient?
• Is the customer convinced it is better in all cases, or just as a situational substitute?

This seems terribly simplistic, but at the same time I have a high degree of confidence that the majority of reasons a customer fails to consider an alternative to their existing solution are likely covered in that short list.