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When Steve Jobs met Robert Friedland in 1972, Robert was the spiritually searching owner of an apple orchard community. He introduced Steve Jobs to a principle called "Reality Distortion Field". In his 2011 biography, Steve Jobs said to his biographer Walter Isaacson: "Friedland … has brought me to a different level of consciousness".

The "Reality Distortion Field" is an extreme version of what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls "penetratingly optimistic" in his book: "Most of us see the world as more benevolent than it really is, our own attributes as cheaper than them and the goals we consider achievable than is likely. "

By creating a Reality Distortion Field, you redesign a problem so that others are more likely to accept your way of thinking. Steve Jobs was very good at rewriting problems, and as such he could encourage people to look at old problems from a new perspective and to gain new insights and approaches to find a solution.

This distortion of reality and the reformulation of the problem has been widely used in politics. Martin Luther King described the political struggle for civil rights as a feasible dream. President Kennedy's call to take a man to the moon within a decade summed up the Cold War problem with the Soviets, although it aroused the imagination of those who heard him.

By redefining the problem, you give yourself the chance to fundamentally change people's mindsets.

The brand algorithm in the brain

In his book Branding with Brains: The Science of Getting Customers to Choose Your Business, Tjaco Walvis from the Netherlands formulated what he calls the "brain algorithm" that makes brand selection, much like Google uses an algorithm to search that Web.

This brain algorithm has three criteria that determine the choice of consumers of one brand over another. These are:

1. Relevance, The more pronounced and relevant a product or service is, the greater the chance that the customer will choose it. Relevant brands are better connected to the dopamine or reward system in the brain (part of the limbic system), which strongly influences our behavior.

2. Coherence, The more coordinated the brand effort over time and space, the greater the chance that the brand will be selected. Coherent branding means repeating the same message over years and across all customer contact points. This makes it easier for the brain to regain the brand and make it a winner in competition with others.

3. Participation, The more interactive the branding environment created for customers, the more likely it is that the brand will be selected by the brain's algorithm. In response to the interactive environment, the brain forms numerous new cell connections and thus improves the memorability of a brand.

For example, Tjaco Walvis notes that Adidas' long-running "Impossible is nothing" campaign shows how all of these factors come together to create an extraordinarily attractive and successful brand that many customers choose over competitors such as Nike. He also shows that these factors manage to avoid a number of traps. The "loss of identity trap" avoids particular relevance, coherence avoids the "authenticity trap" and participation avoids the "brand dilution trap".

Dealing with unconscious customers

We are only at the beginning of what neurological research and modern, updated psychology can do for a better brand experience for customers. Interest in the brain and the way people use their brains to make decisions between different brands is not new. Obviously, it has always been a very attractive goal for any marketer to go beyond the surface and find the secret of preferences and brand decisions.

Now that the new technology gives us an overview of the processes in our brain, we can turn this knowledge into a toolbox for today's brand manufacturers. In this new toolbox, we can focus on the dominant, unconscious brain that is stimulated by patterns rather than details. We have access to the knowledge that the brain is always looking for the new and the unexpected – a tool that we can use to create surprises that satisfy this desire and ensure that our brand stands out from those of our competitors who don't use. By examining innovative people like Steve Jobs, we can see the powerful Reality Distortion Fields ability that can change people's mindsets by reformulating a problem (or possibility) in a new way.

Nobel Prize winners have shown us how we can use the opportunity to secure initial information as a mental anchor for people's decision-making. We know that the entire body and the least intellectual parts of the brain (the limbic systems) are more important for decisions than the more intellectual part of the brain (the neocortex). And how mirror neurons enable us to read other people's thoughts, change feelings or introduce new behavior without using a single word of communication, not least in the areas of participation, participation and enhancement of visual social networking. This new knowledge of the brain shows us a reason to do things differently.

Until recently, however, the general approach was fairly rational, based on the idea that consumers make conscious and conscious decisions and brand decisions. It was believed that decisions were based on the functionality of the branded products rather than their social, mental, or spiritual dimensions. We now know that the functionality of the products is less important for branding than the social, mental or spiritual brand dimension. This has led to a departure from the idea that consumer decisions are rational and that branding is the same as advertising.

ContriBranding Strategy Insider brought to the attention of: Thomas Gad, excerpt from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page Publishing.

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