Your brain made the last five purchase decisions before you even knew you were deciding.
I'm not talking about impulse buys at checkout.
I mean the house you bought, the software you're paying $200/month for, and the strategist you hired last quarter.
All of it?
Emotional.
And you rationalized every single one after the fact.
Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman found that 95% of purchasing decisions happen in the subconscious mind.
Ninety-five percent.
Your customers aren't rational actors. They're feeling machines with a PR department in their frontal lobe whose only job is to make feelings sound like logic.
Every feature list you write, every spec comparison you publish, every "Why Us" page on your site—it's all arriving after the decision's already been made.
You're feeding the rationalization engine, not driving the choice.
The choice happens in the first three seconds. It's whether they feel safe, seen, superior, or scared.
It's whether your brand makes them feel like the person they want to become.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients with damage to the emotional centers of their brains. These people could process information perfectly. They could analyze data, understand pros and cons, and articulate logical arguments.
But they couldn't make decisions.
Not couldn't make good decisions, couldn't make any decisions. AT ALL.
Without emotion, there is no decision. Just paralysis.
Your competitors are still writing rational arguments because that's what they'd want to read. They think their customers sit at kitchen tables with spreadsheets, carefully weighing ROI and feature matrices.
They don't.
Your customers are asking, “Does this brand understand what I'm going through? Will this make me feel less alone? Will this elevate my status? Does this confirm what I already suspected about the world?”
So here's what works instead of another "10 reasons why" blog post:
Tell them what they're feeling before they can name it. Mirror their frustration so precisely they think you've been reading their diary. When they feel seen, they move toward you.
Show them who they become. Not what they get. Who. The founder who doesn't feel like a fraud anymore. The CMO who finally has a strategy that works. Paint that transformation.
Give them an enemy to blame. The outdated playbook. The consultant who burned them. The platform that made false promises. Shared enemies create instant tribes.
One thing to do today: Open your homepage. Read the first three sentences. Do they describe a feeling or a feature? If it's a feature, rewrite it.
Start with the emotion your customer is experiencing right now, not the outcome they want.
Your brand isn't competing on product specs. You're competing for emotional real estate.
The brands that win are the ones that stop pretending humans are logical and start treating them like what they actually are: emotional beings looking for brands that get it.
Reply and tell me: what's one emotion your customers are feeling right now that your competitors refuse to acknowledge?
— Shashank
P.S.
So the pilot of the Brand Foundation Lprint launched a couple of days ago with over 40+ people, and I cannot be happier.
Brand Foundation Sprint is a 7-day email course that teaches decision-making frameworks, not design inspiration.
You go from paralyzed to positioned in one week. Get in if you are ready to launch your brand.
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