When you were younger your parents told you time and time again to look both ways before cross the street. But the truth is, these words probably didn'‘t change your behaviour.

The moment when you truly learned to look both ways before crossing the street is the time you walked into the road and were almost hit by a car. You may not remember this moment, but it probably happened.

It’s likely that on one occasion, you forgot to look before crossing and a car whizzed by dangerously close to you. Your heart jumped, your palms started sweating and your breathing quickened.

According to the theory, at this moment your brain and body created a “marker” in your memory. Nowadays, you always look both ways before you cross the street, even if you don’t remember the moment you learned the behaviour.

And we create these “markers” throughout our life. The markers provide us with a non-conscious shortcut to making decisions. And this is intuition.

Intuition helped us to avoid poisonous foods, know whether to trust other humans, to navigate through the world without a map and to generally keep us alive in a dangerous pre-technology world.

We survived through millennia using this intuition or these “gut feelings”.

The problem is..

These “gut feelings” can be manufactured by advertising.



Because when you watch Coca-Cola commercial and see young, healthy people having fun drinking Coke your brain creates a “marker”.

Your subconscious brain now has a marker that links the visual red and white logo of Coca-Cola to young, health and fun.

And at that moment, when you’re standing in front of that drinks fridge deciding what to buy, your brain picks up the very same red and white logo of Coca-Cola. In a split second, the “marker” that was placed in your subconscious during the commercial you watched reappears.

Buying a bottle of Coca-Cola just “feels” right. And you buy it without much thought about why you made the decision you did.

And there is is. The feather dropped onto the scales by the commercial changed your behaviour.

And that’s why Coca-Cola spends $565 Million on advertising every single year in the US alone.

Of course not all of these markers will land. Many of them will not have enough of an impact to be remembered. But some of them will.

If you live in the UK, you will remember this advertising campaign. (An incredibly successful advertising campaign I might add).

Meet The Andrex Puppy