I have more Apple boxes in my garage than I have Apple products in my office.
This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I can’t get myself to throw them away. Those pristine white boxes with their perfect typography and magnetic closures. They’re just far too satisfying for the garbage bin. My wife thinks I’m crazy, and she’s probably right—usually is! But I don’t think I’m alone in my madness.
Here’s a simple test: Think about the last premium product you bought and ask yourself, do I remember opening it? If it was an Apple product, you probably do. And that’s not an accident.
Apple spends millions of dollars engineering their unboxing experience. The resistance when you lift the lid. The way components nest perfectly in place. Even the sound the box makes when it closes… That satisfying magnetic snap. It’s all engineered for immersion.
Most companies throw their product in bubble wrap and call it a day. Apple treats the box as the first moment of brand relationship, knowing that your initial tactile experience programs your memory. And memory drives future buying decisions. They understand something crucial: Your brain decides how it feels about a purchase before you’ve even used the product.
This is neuroscience in action, and every brand can apply it.
Your brand lives in someone else’s head
Your brand doesn’t live in your logo file, website, or pitch deck. It lives in the minds of others. Which means that every brand strategist is secretly in the business of making memories.
“Your brand isn’t what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.” – Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
Brand strategists are up against a hard statistic: Up to 95% of purchase decisions happen in the subconscious. Harvard’s Dr. Gerald Zaltman has been saying this for decades. Let that resonate for a second because it means that if your brand only speaks to logic or surface-level messaging, then you’re missing the actual decisionmaker. Namely, the limbic system.
I’ve spent the last decade watching this play out with everyone from global music brands to scrappy local non-profits. The brands that stick aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or cleverest campaigns. They’re the ones that lean into this understanding about how memory actually works.
This is why I recommend neurobranding and seeking answers in the broader applied sciences. Today’s business leaders need an approach to brand strategy that starts with hard neuroscience—what we know about how brains process emotion, story, and trust.
In adopting neurobranding, you’ll find that three core mechanics drive everything:
- Immersion—peak moments that encode into memory
- Neural coupling—stories that sync brains to brands
- Subconscious priming—building decision shortcuts below awareness.
Here’s how each one of those mechanics works.
Engineer peak moments of immersion
At Claremont Graduate University, Dr. Paul Zak’s lab has developed a way to measure something using neuroscience. When people are completely immersed in an experience, their brains release oxytocin, the same neurochemical involved in trust and bonding. Notably, this is the same hormone the brain releases when a mother breastfeeds her newborn, helping them form a strong bond. It’s often called the “love hormone”.
According to Dr. Zak, “When people are immersed, they take action.” Whether that’s buying something, sharing a story, or remembering a brand weeks later.
Disney figured this out decades ago. I often tell the story of standing in line for the Star Wars ride called “Rise of the Resistance”. It was a brutal two-hour wait, but I noticed that my kids weren’t bothered nor bored. They had become enthralled with the experiences engineered into the waiting areas. Disney didn’t build another boring place to stand in line. They made every nook into an immersive world building experience that kept you in wonder.
The queue winds through a Resistance base with holographic briefings from Rey and BB-8. Storm troopers patrol the corridors in menacing fashion. You overhear radio chatter about rebel missions. Props from the films are displayed at eye level. Even the air smells different—recycled and metallic, as if you’re actually aboard a spaceship. Rather than boredom, the waiting area bred anticipation. According to Zak’s work in immersion, that feeling has shown to create nearly as much oxytocin as a ride itself.
This isn’t decoration. It’s neurological architecture.
I witnessed this with a small brick and mortar guitar shop, as well. The store experience was redesigned around immersion, with a flow built around zones of interest. Strategic lighting, the smell of wood and leather, guitars positioned so you had to touch them to get by. Coffee in the parents waiting section by the lessons room. Every square foot was considered for maximum effect. Sales increased by 32% in six months, but more importantly, customers started spending twice as long in the store. It was an entirely different experience. Visitors were getting immersed and responding in kind.
The tactical piece: Map your customer touchpoints and ask where emotion spikes. Your onboarding sequence, first purchase experience, unboxing moment, email drip. Every single one of these are memory-making opportunities.
Tell stories that sync brains (neural coupling)
Uri Hasson at Princeton hooked people up to fMRI machines and had them listen to stories. And something unexpected happened: The listener’s brain activity began mirroring the storyteller’s, not just in language areas but in emotional processing regions, too.
This is called neural coupling. When someone tells you a compelling story or one that piques your aspirations or interests, your brain literally syncs up with theirs. This neurological sync-up is what separates memorable brands from the rest. It’s why some big screen productions easily evoke a visceral reaction, while other movies are forgotten within a week.
When your brand story aligns so closely with customer identity that the boundary disappears, you’ve achieved neural coupling.
Patagonia has been pulling this off for some time now. They don’t sell outdoor gear; they sell environmental purpose. Watch one of their short films about activism or conservation. Your brain starts firing neurons in the same patterns as someone who deeply cares about the planet. Buying Patagonia becomes an identity signal, not just a transaction.
If you think that’s only for the bigger brands, think again. Imagine you’re a niche real estate team specializing in Southern California’s mid-century modern homes. Mid-century modern enthusiasts don’t care about upgraded kitchens or open floor plans. They care about aesthetic fidelity. They want to live inside architectural history.
So, what if instead of generic property listings, every home became a story? What if you focused your communications on who designed it, the design principles that shaped it, and how it fit into the broader cultural movement?
That team of realtors would no longer be selling properties; they’d position themselves as curators, even protectors of architectural history. Their social media would shift from “3 bed, 2 bath” to “Richard Neutra’s vision of California modernism, preserved.” And I guarantee you the results would follow, not just in offers but in deeper engagement, as well. Because buyers would feel understood rather than marketed to.
This is how neural coupling works. The story becomes part of how buyers see themselves.
Prime the subconscious with symbols and rituals
Neuroscientists say the brain is lazy, but what they really mean is it takes up so much of our energy (the human brain, despite making up only 2% of the body’s weight, uses approximately 20% of the body’s total energy) that it is always looking for more efficient ways of working. Daniel Kahneman called this shortcut building System 1 thinking. It’s fast, automatic, and mostly unconscious.
Your brain is constantly building shortcuts.
When the same emotional cue gets paired with the same symbol, sound, or color repeatedly, your brain wires that connection. That’s basic Hebbian learning: Neurons that fire together, wire together. That should definitely be a bumper sticker slogan.
The key is understanding that, while these neural shortcuts operate below conscious awareness, they powerfully influence behavior.
Netflix’s sound logo (you know, that deep “badummmmm”) is brilliant subconscious priming. It doesn’t just announce content is starting; it primes your brain to expect something cinematic, elevated, and worth paying attention to. Twenty-five years of consistent pairing, and that sound now triggers anticipation before you’ve seen a single frame.
I recently witnessed this from a professional in the audio industry who started ending each of his emails with a brief audio signature, singing the same three-note melody in the same order. Within six months, customers began recognizing emails from the company in their inbox before even reading the sender line. They’d developed a subconscious association between those three notes and quality professional audio production to the point that even his email open rates increased by double digits. That simple audio cue had become his brand identifier at a subconscious level.
This is also why dismissing visual identity as unimportant misses how the brain actually works. People often say “logos don’t matter” or “your logo is not your brand”, but the subconscious mind doesn’t speak in language. It thinks in patterns, associations, sensations, and emotion. This is why a certain scent reminds you of your grandmother, or a particular song brings you back in time.
The subconscious recognizes a brand by symbol, color, and contour before reading a single word. It responds to feeling long before it processes meaning. This is why the strongest brands don’t just speak to the logical brain. And yes, I know—the logo still isn’t the brand, but it serves as a very important symbol of your brand.
The practical application: Identify the sensory elements you can own and repeat. Sound, scent, color, typography, even behavioral rituals. Pair them with emotionally charged moments. And be ruthlessly consistent.
We’re drowning in AI-generated content and infinite scroll. The brands that rise above will be the ones embedded deepest in the reptile brain.
That means emotion. Memory. Biology.
From theory to practice
Most strategists are working within a familiar framework. Maybe you use Porter’s Five Forces, or Brand Key, or Brand Identity Prism, or something you’ve developed on your own. But when you lay the 3 core principles of the neurobrand approach at the onset of your framework and consider them paramount in the process, you’re not adding a fluffy layer of applied psychology as an add-on to your work. No, you’re starting from keen insights about how people think (or feel), and how they actually make decisions.
So, keep in mind that
- Immersion shows up in sensory design, emotional spikes, brand rituals, and exceptional (unexpected) experiences.
- Neural coupling drives brand narrative, customer experiences, and origin stories, and it makes connections that automatically build trust.
- Subconscious priming shapes visual identity, language patterns, and symbolic repetition so that your audience can drop a memory anchor, ready to recall at will.
Remember when marketers used to write weird, spammy SEO-driven comms? Today, we’re drowning in AI content and algorithmic sameness. We work in a field that chases tech and trends. And while technology keeps upgrading, the human mind is still optimized for survival. The brands that rise above will be the ones that remember our brains—although evolved—are still making decisions the same way our ancestors did.
We’re all running on emotional, pattern-seeking neural hardware that evolved to see threats, not study spreadsheets. We tell ourselves we’re logical, reason-driven creatures, but we’re not. We’re meaning-seeking animals with some strong executive function layered in for good measure.
The smartest strategists work with this reality rather than against it. They build brands for the part of the brain that actually makes decisions, not the part that rationalizes afterward.
Start there, and everything else becomes possible.