Search Engine Optimization for the Brain

Search engine optimization (SEO) companies specialize in getting a brand’s website found on Google and other online search engines. But what is your company doing about optimizing your brand for the mental search engine?

We learn from a Google search that the most relevant answers to consumer inquiries rise to the top (or at least that’s the idea). This concept of relevancy applies to offline marketing strategies as well. But without a computer, the brand needs to be found first in the consumer’s mind rather than a computer screen.

When searching online and off, are consumers really looking for uniqueness? To optimize a brand for the brain, we must shift our thinking away from some traditional brand strategy approaches that focus on product uniqueness, and think more in terms of consumer relevancy. If we look at the leading brands in any category, we find that these products or services aren’t that unique at all. Instead, they are the most relevant to the most customers.

When optimizing for this mental search, traditional brand strategists must also think like an SEO company. To better understand this process, we can utilize how Google rewards web content relevancy, and work to build similar tactics offline. The more a website makes sense to the inquiry, the more likely it will be among the top results. The same is true in mental search. Think of buying a mattress, for example, and people in the Northwest think of Sleep Country USA first, because they can instantly recall the “Why buy a mattress anywhere else?” jingle.

We can also gain insight into consumer relevancy by observing how people search for a product online. What we learn can translate into the overall brand strategy. Typically, consumers start with a broad based search (mattresses) and then begin to refine (mattresses on sale in Seattle). We ask the questions: What are the most common search words they will use? How can we optimize our web site that will make it the most relevant for the most likely inquiries? What can we do to be in the top position or above the fold? What can we do to be found first?

Now we need to do the same thing with the brain. Substitute ‘website’ with ‘brand’, and instead of Google, imagine a customer with a need trying to recall a specific company. When a customer begins their mental search, we want their internal results to return your brand first.

Because human search engines don’t deliver results the same way a computer does, we need to better help consumers recall what will become their own top results. To ensure your brand becomes the first their brains return, we must clearly and unmistakably link your brand identity with their “search” parameters. In short, we need the brand and the need it fulfills to be very easy to remember. When this is achieved, the brand quickly becomes the most relevant in the mind.

When we think of the brand strategy process as search engine optimization for the brain, we can work towards creating the most relevant brand to the most people. The brand will be found first, even when there’s no computer around.

Responsibility Without Sacrifice

It starts as the typical car commercial. Splash! A shiny silver sedan breaks through a cascading wall of water. Slow motion film of the car racing seductively across the wet pavement. Series of quick cuts to shots of the headlights, tail lights, and spinning wheels as the car rips down an empty highway. Extreme close up of water dripping down the silver letters that read... hydrogen 7.

Hydrogen what!?!

Cut to BMW logo. Tagline fades up under: Responsibility with Performance.

The tagline in one of BMW’s newest car commercials sums up what today’s marketers should know about “green” marketing in America: consumers like the idea of being environmentally responsible, but now if it actually means sacrificing something. We don’t want a hydrogen-powered car if it doesn’t go 0-60 in under seven seconds. We don’t want to give up our giant SUVs, but a hybrid engine would be nice. But it had better not be too expensive.

This is much different than what marketers faced during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Then, American consumers were asked to make major concessions in both their products and behaviors.

Marketers responded in kind with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Hondas and Toyotas began replacing Cadillacs and Buicks in American driveways.

But over the years our cars have gotten bigger than ever. The GLC has been replaced by the SUV. Our average fuel efficiency has gone from 28 mpg in the 1980s down to 24 mpg today. With an aging and more conservative U.S. population with a larger buying power than ever, we really don’t want to forgo our luxuries.

This doesn’t mean there’s not value in marketing environmentally responsible products. It is a huge and expanding market. But green is quickly becoming the cost of entry. It is now the marketers and not the consumers that are expected to make the concessions.

The responsibility without sacrifice mentality even enters our single most expensive purchase: our homes. In the 1970s, government actions were taken to create new energy codes that required home insulation, caulking and double pane windows.

But despite all the green-speak in today’s new-home market, consumers are reluctant to pay the price. In a recent series of focus groups my company conducted for the house-building industry, we tested a multitude of “green building” concepts with consumers. First-time homebuyers, and retiring “down-sizers” delved into the marketing appeal of five different home construction companies that offered various environmentally conscious building techniques. Happily, we learned that green building and energy saving concepts were all very appealing to consumers. We were right on target, we assumed. But there was one major caveat: “Green is great,” we learned, “as long as we don’t have to give up square-footage.”

In the short term, “building green” will fall somewhere behind the fourth bathroom in order of importance. And only a few lucky drivers will make the expensive green fashion statement with their hydrogen-powered BMWs. For now, it seems the bulk of today’s consumers will expect green to be a feature, not a concession. And as marketers, we must meet the challenge.