Brain Science Behind Positioning

I’ve been super into brain science recently. Brain science is my umbrella term for neuroscience, psychology, and learning optimization - the typical love interest of self-helpers. I’m currently reading The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin.

Levitin first explained how our brains perform attention, memory, and categorization. The focus was categorization and the cognitive economy that it provided. This cognitive economy fueled our survival as hunters and gatherers but struggled to adapt to our modern world with its ever-increasing complexity, size, and data.

Unintentionally, Levitin revealed the biological engineering behind the core marketing principle called positioning. Positioning is best explained by a book of the same name by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Positioning demonstrated how a single brand can dominate an entire product category. Two easy examples are Kleenex for tissues and Google for online searches. Positioning was published in 1980, right before the emergence of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques. Authors from this era usually distill a lifetime of expert experience into specific principles. We knew that these principles worked, but we didn’t know how. In the ’90s, new inventions like PET, fMRI, and MEG gave an enlightening look under the hood of psychology.

Published in 2014, The Organized Mind gives us a peek into the real science that makes positioning possible. Levitin says that people have

an intuitive sense of what constitutes a category member and how well it fits the category…This ability to recognize diversity and organize it into categories is a biological reality that is absolutely essential to the organized human mind.

This pair of books is an exciting demonstration of the evolution of brain science.

Amazon link to The Organized Mind