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Why Your Brain Buys Stuff You Don't Need

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At the American Marketing Research conference, Jamie Turner of 60secondmarketer presented twelve secrets as to why we buy things.

1. People buy for emotional reasons, then rationalize the purchase with logic. A great example is Porsche, which is never bought for logical reasons. Why does a man with thinning hair buying a $120,000 Porsche? For sex appeal. However, when his wife asks him to justify the purchase, he will have a host of rationalizations.
2. The female brain has 25% more connections between right and left hemispheres than the male brain. This is one of the reasons that women are better at multi-tasking.
3. Humans often don’t know why they prefer one brand over another. A Baylor University study of a blind taste test of Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi-Cola showed 50% preference for each; in the identified taste test, 80% preferred Coca-Cola. We have deeply ingrained images of polar bears, Santa Claus, Mean Joe Greene, "I'd like to teach the world to sing", World War II, Americana. Pepsi doesn't have the same depth of connections. You have to create a memory and an emotional trigger for your brand.
4. Different parts of the brain control different stimuli responses. The old brain, the lizard brain, is the subcortical and limbic area thinks on an instinctive level. This is controlled by the more modern brain, pre-frontal cortex.  
5. The brain processes information non-linearly. "We would love to believe it's A + B + C = D."
6. The brain wants to create as much dopamine as possible. When we do a great research report, dopamine is released in our brain. So you want to get consumers' brains to create dopamine when they experience your brand; you want to hit their pleasure center. In an experiment on rats, rats choose cocaine over food, starving themselves to death in favor of pleasure.
7. Novelty is the single most effective factor in capturing our brain’s precious attention. When people see something new, they engage with it more.
8. Transactional data suggests that humans respond to certain key words more readily than others. The fourteen most effective trigger words are free, you, save, money, easy, guarantee, health, results, new, love, discovery, proven, safety.
9. People lie to researchers. While they don't always lie to researchers, they do underreport alcohol consumption and overreport sex.
10. As much as 95% of human thought happens in the subconscious mind. A lot of our behaviors are subconscious. For instance, people are attracted to other people with dilated pupils, which is a sign of subconscious attraction.
11. Women respond to non-verbal stimuli more effectively than men. Perhaps as a result of closer interaction to the non-verbal cues of infants.
12. We take in 11 million bits of information per second, but the brain can only process 40 bits per second. We are in a constant world of trying to get rid of this stimuli. As we grow older, our memory doesn't get worse, but older people are less able to weed out the other stimuli.