Brain Food: Patterns and Predictions

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

When we consider customers’ feelings, thoughts and behaviors, and how all these things come to be, none of them would’ve happened without the neuron: The conduit through which all experiential information is channeled in the customer’s brain.

As we experience shopping environments, whether in-store or online, neurons are activated, sending electrical signals that result in patterns coded for perceptions, feelings and behaviors. “All that you perceive of the visual world – the shapes, colors and movements of everything around you – is coded into these rivers of spikes with varying time intervals separating them,” according to a 2012 report by Terry Sejnowski and Toby Debruck, published in Scientific American.

Billions of neurons are receiving thousands of signals every second from thousands of other brain cells – and the spikes of electricity blasting down the neurons come fast and furiously. It’s not the sheer number of spikes that makes a difference in things like perception, memory formation and behavior. Instead, researchers are discovering that the pattern and frequency of firings likely lead to perception, cognition and memory formation.

The firing frequency and the pattern of the electrical blasts create a sort of code. Embedded in the code are all the features of a visual image – the location of objects in a space, as well as shapes, colors, textures, light contrasts, and how the objects are moving.

It’s not just the firing pattern in one neuron; it’s also the pattern of other neurons that fire in relation to it that allow customers to fully experience their environment. One neuron may have connections to 10,000 other neurons in a complex web across the brain. The combined activation of cells may signal the brain to pay attention to a particular merchandise display, graphic or digital screen.

When we consider how customers visually process a shopping environment “some evidence suggests that synchronized timing – with each spike representing one aspect of an object (color or orientation) – functions as a means of assembling an image from component parts,” according to the aforementioned report from Scientific American.  So a pattern of spikes signaling “round contour,” for example, fire in sync with a pattern representing “the color orange,” enabling the visual cortex to understand that what you’re looking at in the grocery store is an orange, not an apple.

Everything we do as customers is based on neural firing patterns. When we make a practice of coming back to a store or consistently buying apparel from a certain brand, we’re creating a positive association and sense of pleasure with a product, experiencing the repetition of neural firing patterns that reinforce the connections between brain cells.

The more these firings take place, the more the resultant memories, perceptions, thoughts or behaviors become hardwired into who you are. This is commonly known as the “fire together-wire together” rule for how neural connections in the brain work. The more you practice something, the more it’s embedded into your brain’s neural firing patterns. So, your experiences in a shopping place actually become a physical part of who you are.

Good branding, effective retailing and enhancing customer satisfaction are all about strengthening associations to positive experiences through repeated neural firing. How can retailers create fully committed and impassioned shoppers who repeatedly visit their stores or website? Practice, practice, practice! They need to get their customers to practice patterns of behaviors that result in positive feelings. This, of course, puts pressure on every retailer to not only deliver “the goods,” but also the positive feelings coded into each branded experience the customer comes in contact with.

The flipside of having good experiences is that bad experiences are also easily wired into customers’ neural networks. Things that are inconsistent with expectations are quickly identified because they don’t fit an established firing pattern, and the brain puts the breaks on, alerting other areas that something is amiss. If the “out-of-place” aspect of the experience is something negative, a whole different process of brain activation takes place, signaling the need for avoidance.

In fact, the brain is set up to identify experiences that are likely to have negative consequences more regularly than it is to search out positive ones. After all, millions of years ago, it made sense to first identify things that may have caused us harm, like being eaten by the “big thing” prowling the tall grass, than to have found pleasure in finding lunch for ourselves.

When variables are consistent with each visit, the customer’s brain quickly learns the sequence of events that are about to occur, and the trip unfolds with a sense of confidence and comfort. Consistency in delivery of the shopping experience sets customer expectations, and they come to rely on these established patterns to understand a store.

When customers form strong bonds to retail places, they embed memories and emotions into their neural networks. The more they think about brands they love, and the more they shop at stores they have an affinity for, the more these brands, retailers and stores literally become parts of who those customers are – experience changes our neurophysiology.

Combined with a set of prewired neural networks resulting from millions of years of human development, the new patterns that are built through engagement with shopping become a powerful force in shaping the customer’s experience along the path to purchase.

David Kepron is the creative director of Little’s Brand Experience Studio and author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. His retail design work focuses on the creation of relevant shopping experiences at the intersection of architecture, sociology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com; www.littleonline.com

Be sure to see David's session (“Design is Not a Department: Understanding and Engaging the Creative Mind in Retail Place Making“) at IRDC this year, Sept. 9-11 in Austin, Texas! For more information about IRDC, visit IRDConline.com.