In his whitepaper entitled Absorption, Dr. A.K. Pradeep (aka Dr. Deep) tells marketers that it’s not enough to just engage with customers — though that certainly is a worthwhile endeavor — as that only brings us to the gateway to the brain. We need to step further into a state where marketing messages are fully absorbed. And not just to one part of the brain, but to those deeper regions where emotions and memory retention reside, both crucial to the formation of what we call persuasion, which is transformed to purchase intent.
The example Dr. Deep uses is a sponge. At any given moment, he claims, the brain takes in as many as a hundred million individual stimuli from our five senses. When fully activated, the brain consumes the equivalent of “a bottle of wine’s worth of blood a minute” as it records and reacts to all this stimuli.
The image of a bottle of red wine filled with blood is now being fully absorbed into my brain and I’m not sure I like it.
Anyway, these processes occur in many different sectors of the brain and Dr. Deep has tracked up to 128 of them, working simultaneously, all critical to achieving full absorption of the marketing message.
Full absorption, he contends, is the gold standard for any marketing campaign.
From the consumer’s standpoint, he points out, a marketing message must be so interesting and pleasing to the brain that it opens up and takes it in fully and willingly. There would be the challenge in today’s cluttered market environment — creating message content that compelling requires a deeper level of insight to the interests and emotional triggers of different customers, something most marketers are missing as they focus on the medium and their own creative gratification.
This is not a new thing, Dr. Deep admits. Absorption is one of the most fundamental brain functions, no doubt evolved as a survival mechanism.
“When there are saber tooth tigers in your neighborhood,” he says, “taking in as many stimuli as you can is a pretty good idea.”
Who could argue with that?
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