Internal Dialogue: How Unconscious Mind talks with our Conscious.

Did you know that most of our talking is with ourselves? Did you know the importance as marketers of targeting consumer’s unconscious mind?

In this post I am going to review in a much more comprehensive and practical way some ideas of unconscious marketing from Guerrilla Marketing – Jay Conrad Levinson.

Unconscious Mind (UM) vs Conscious Mind (CM)

According to this author, our behavior is divided into Conscious and Unconscious Decision Making Processes. The UM is in charge of so much more information and decisions than the CM. When the CM can process at the most four or five things the UM can analyze and process millions of situations and decisions. The most common situation is the UM not telling the CM all the outputs of his decisions in order to avoid an overload of the CM. Imagine that it would be impossible to live if you have to pay attention to breath, to blink, to salivate or even to beat your heart.  

But don’t think that our Conscious Mind is unnecessary or even stupid because in most cases (not every case) CM override the UM decisions.  

But we are not here to talk of every system in separated. We must understand how they connect. The main idea is what Jay calls the Internal Dialogue. This is how our UM tries to talk to the CM. I mean, all the times we make our Unconscious Value Equation, when we analyze common situations, or even when we have the famous ‘hunch’ or “Gut Feeling”.

UM is in charge of the Internal Dialogue

The voices we hear in our head are totally normal, and do not mean we have schizophrenia.  This is how our brain thinks, this is how it works. This voices or internal dialogue is so normal that is probably that you can hear it while you are reading this post. It happened because language is actually verbal, and the writing is only the representation of a word.

The main idea I want to send is the importance of generating this internal dialogue. This mechanism is a very big opportunity for marketers because its influence in the decision-making process. Taking your prospect into a positive state will affect their purchase decisions in a good way. And you should use language in your favor to make that possible. For example instead of advertising “Without a security alarm, your family is at a risk”, you should say, “Sleep soundly in the safe knowledge that you have protected your home and family”.  Being in a positive state help to avoid buyer’s remorse, and increase repurchasing behavior. Buyer’s remorse is other way of Internal Talking that results of the contradiction between the UM and the CM in the purchase decision. Often we decide to buy stuff that we know we don’t need but we consciously decide to do it anyway.

Internal Dialogue to generate Trust

Other big use of Internal Dialogue in marketing is that it gives better results in gaining consumer’s trust.  It is much more efficient to let the consumer’s brain get or come out with the conclusion we want to state than sending the direct message. The main difference is the trust that we have to our brain vs the trust we have to the message transmitter. It could take weeks or month of efforts to become trustable to the consumer’s brain. But if we communicate “unconscious clues” to the consumer’s brain so it reveals the same message by its own, it is going to be much more comfortable and confident with the marketing message and it will probably turn into more committed decisions.

Timing in Decisions

The author explains that the UM works in a faster way than the CM, and of course with a quicker response. The importance comes from the knowledge that is possible for marketers to make prospects take decisions before they are consciously aware that the decision has been made. This is actually the result of “marketing to the unconscious mind”.

Also UM can take decisions without consulting the CM, and gives the marketer a window to work on.

To completely understand the timing in UM vs CM, the author include a real story about a Fireman Officer:

"A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen.

The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn’t. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, “There’s something wrong here,” and he immediately ordered his men out.

Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, he could not explain it at all.

It took well over two hours of questioning for the fire lieutenant to piece together how he knew to get out. (First, the fire didn’t respond as it was supposed to; second, the fire was abnormally hot; third, it was quiet when it should have been noisier given the heat.)"

In this case, the smarter UM analyze tons of experiences of the lieutenant in just seconds to reach to the conclusion that there was a danger.

As a global conclusion we can say that the importance of UM exceeds marketing purposes but of course we could and should use them and take advantage to grow our businesses.