Why saying you're the best doesn't work

I am interested in people and in what, how and why they think what they think. This is one of the reasons, advertising as a marketing communication tool used by brands to communicate with consumers simply fascinates me. Advertising due to media fragmentation isn´t as powerful as it was in the past, but if correctly used it still has the potential to create an emotional impact in consumer´s minds. 

We live in a World where so many brands offer very similar products, so it is very difficult to sell stuff based only on logic and rationality. Here is where advertising can help. Advertising helps creating an emotional impact, or as Seth Godin would say, advertising helps brands build symbolic meaning through a narrative (but it needs to be bold and audacious) that captures the imagination of the key audience grabbing people emotionally and making them want to be involved with the message. However, most of the brands out there seem to not understand this and they use advertising (or whatever other marketing communications tools they use) really in a wrong way. 

Every single day, as consumers we are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages and most of them unfortunately tend to assume our behaviour is rational. This is why we see so many brands stating they are the best, they offer the best service in town, or the best quality products, listing us complex information like features and benefits, or facts and figures. This is a wrong approach and biology can explain why so many brands don´t have a clue of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Here is why. The explanation is the human brain and how it works.

The human brain is basically broken into 3 major different components: the neocortex and two middle sections, our lymbic brains. The neocortex is the structure of our brain responsible for our rational and analytical thought, and is also involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of our motor commands and language. The lymbic brains are responsible for our feelings, stuff like trust or loyalty so important for brands. It is also responsible for human behaviour. Our decision making process has no room for language as it is driven by our emotions, or by other words, it is driven by our lymbic brains. So why do brands seem to prefer to talk to our neocortex (remember, the neocortex doesn´t drive our behaviour) by saying they are the best in what they do and listing us a bunch of rational stuff like features and benefits rather than talking directly to the part of brain that controls our behaviour with inspiring messages that create emotional impact on us? This is a huge mystery to me! 

For instance, let´s look at a successful brand like Bang & Olufsen. Have you ever thought about why B&O is so successful? If your answer was it´s because of their design, you aren´t exactly right. The right answer is:

it´s because they know why they do what they do. They have an inspiring philosophy and they clearly communicate it straight to the lymbic brains of their target audience. Everytime B&O introduces a new product, the danish brand causes a similar stir and it´s all because of their philosophy: creating audio concepts that combine in such a brilliant way authentic sound quality with simple yet surprising design and a touch of magic.So that living with it becomes a truly special pleasure.It´s such a powerful message isn´t it? Much more powerful than if they would go the other way round by stating just like everybody else that they offer the best audio concepts, and the best design, with the best features of the market, etc. Do you notice the difference?