As I discussed in a previous post, products alleviate pain. But finding the pain is only part of the challenge. Once the source of temptation is found, be it hunger, fear, boredom, or any number of other triggers, a connection must be formed in the customer’s mind between the craving and the company’s offering.

An association is a memory that informs the way the world appears. If a company can form a connection between the trigger and its product, it can create a habit. Associations crowd out rational thought, enabling the “doing without thinking” characteristic of habits. But are associations and the memories they are based on really powerful enough to prevent us from thinking?

Consider the image to the right.

Take a guess at which surface is darker, the top square or the bottom? Assuming you’ve seen any number of similar optical illusions, you likely anticipate that there is a trick, and you’d be right. With your finger, cover up the line that separates the two squares. Doing so reveals the two squares are the exact same color. Why does this happen?

The answer is your brain has learned an indelible association. Your brain can’t register this image any other way unless you stop seeing the line in the middle which, when removed makes the two squares look like a solid object, not two stacked squares.

Associations are powerful and long lasting, indicating that they might have served an important evolutionary purpose. One hypothesis is that these associations help us make faster decisions my jumping to conclusions we’ve seen play out before. These associations are critical to what makes brands valuable and how we make automatic decisions about what we buy.