Mumin Marketing Memo (M3) - Case 1
Your Customers Aren't Thinking. Their Brains Are.
I used to think I was good at reading people.
Early in my career, I'd sit in campaign reviews, confident that if our messaging was clear and our value proposition strong, conversions would follow. Logical product, logical pitch, logical customer. That was the formula.
Then a client asked me a question that stopped me cold: "If our product is objectively better and cheaper than the competition, why are we losing?"
The answer, I eventually learned, had nothing to do with logic. It never did.
The Brain Doesn't Buy the Way You Think It Does
Here's a statistic that should fundamentally change how you approach every campaign you ever run: research suggests up to 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious, driven by emotional responses rather than rational analysis.
Read that again. Not 20%. Not 50%. Ninety-five percent.
This isn't a marketing blogger's opinion. It comes from studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research, and it's backed by Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, whose decades of research confirm that the vast majority of buying decisions happen below the level of conscious awareness.
What this means for every marketer reading this is simple and uncomfortable: your customers are not reading your carefully crafted feature list and making a rational decision. They're feeling their way to a conclusion, and then using logic to justify it after the fact.
This is the foundation of neuromarketing, and once you understand it, you can't unsee it.
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What Exactly Is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing sits at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing strategy. Instead of asking consumers what they think, which, as we now know, they often can't accurately tell you, it studies how the brain actually responds to brands, ads, packaging, pricing, and experiences.
The tools read like something out of a sci-fi film: fMRI scanners measuring blood flow in the brain, EEG headsets tracking electrical activity, eye-tracking software mapping exactly where your gaze lands on a webpage, and facial coding systems reading micro-expressions you didn't even know you made.
The underlying science is fascinating. The human brain processes emotional stimuli thousands of times faster than rational thought. The limbic system, our brain's emotional centre, activates long before the neocortex engages in logical analysis, essentially pre-determining our choices before we consciously evaluate options.
Think about that the next time you're writing a headline, designing a landing page, or briefing your creative team on an ad.
The global neuromarketing market was valued at USD 1.71 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 2.62 billion by 2030, which tells you one thing clearly: the world's biggest brands aren't guessing anymore. They're measuring.
The Brands Already Using This
You don't have to look far for proof that this works.
Coca-Cola is perhaps the most cited example in neuromarketing history, and for good reason. Coca-Cola has such a strong belief in neuromarketing that it constructed its own in-house lab, measuring brain activity in volunteer subjects to determine which advertisements are likely to get the best results.
Their "Share a Coke" campaign, where they printed individual names on bottles, wasn't just a fun idea. It was a deliberate neuromarketing play, using personalization to create a sense of belonging and emotional connection that enhanced brand loyalty. The result? A measurable lift in sales in markets where the campaign was launched.
Then there's Frito-Lay, whose story is one of my favourites in this space. When traditional focus groups told them consumers disliked a prank-themed ad, EEG mapping revealed the opposite. Brain activity showed that participants actually enjoyed the ad but were too self-conscious to admit it in a group setting. The results were so striking that Frito-Lay's Chief Marketing Officer at the time concluded that brain-imaging tests can actually be more accurate than focus groups.
This is the real value of neuromarketing: it removes the social filter. People lie in surveys, sometimes consciously, often not. Their brains don't.
And Netflix? Netflix uses AI-driven neuromarketing to optimize thumbnails, selecting images that generate the highest engagement based on eye-tracking and click-through rates. That thumbnail you clicked on? It wasn't random. It was engineered to trigger your subconscious curiosity.
Closer to home, Emirates is perhaps the Gulf's most masterful practitioner of emotion-first marketing, even if they'd never use the word "neuromarketing" in a press release.
Emirates rarely shouts about features. Instead, it shows you what flying with them feels like. The creative is always polished, the tone confident without being cold, and that premium emotional message doesn't stop at the ad. Every touchpoint, from the boarding experience to the cabin design to the in-flight entertainment system, is engineered to trigger the same subconscious feeling: you made the right choice.
Emirates has successfully moved from being a transport company to a global lifestyle brand, building emotional connections with travellers that feel more personal than traditional advertising. That's not branding intuition. That's a deep understanding of how the brain encodes aspiration, belonging, and identity, the same principles that neuromarketing research has been confirming in labs for two decades.
The Numbers That Make the Business Case
If you need to convince a skeptical CMO or client, here are the numbers that do the talking:
Emotionally-driven campaigns outperform rational ones by 31% in long-term memory encoding.
Purely emotional ad campaigns deliver twice the profitability of those relying solely on rational content.
Emotional response drives up to 2.5x ROI on ad spend, based on a 2024 meta-analysis by Affectiva.
58% of consumers are willing to pay a premium for brands that create positive emotional experiences.
Ads tested using neuromarketing methods boost purchase intent by 16% over those guided only by surveys or interviews, according to a 2024 Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience report.
These aren't marginal gains. They're the difference between a campaign that shifts product and one that builds a brand people are loyal to for life.
What This Looks Like in Practice, Without a Lab
Here's where I want to be honest with you: most of us don't have the budget to run fMRI studies or hire a neuromarketing agency. I certainly don't run brain scans at Coreo Real Estate.
But neuromarketing's principles are accessible to every marketer right now. Here's how I apply them:
The skill set is evolving. We're moving from executors to strategists and editors. Instead of spending hours writing email copy variations, we're:
Lead with emotion, justify with logic.
Structure every campaign with an emotional hook first. The feature list comes later, after you've made someone feel something. Think about how you feel watching a great Nike ad before you ever see a product. That sequence is intentional.
Use social proof aggressively.
Social proof can increase the likelihood of purchase by up to 270%. Reviews, testimonials, user numbers, client logos, these aren't decorative. They're neurological trust signals. In the Gulf market specifically, where community recommendation and word-of-mouth carry significant cultural weight, this principle is amplified.
Reduce cognitive friction
The brain is lazy by design. It takes shortcuts; the easier your messaging, your UX, your checkout process, the more likely the purchase. Every unnecessary step is a reason for the subconscious to say no.
Be deliberate with colour and sensory cues.
Coca-Cola's signature red is strategically used to evoke excitement and passion, influencing consumer behaviour on a subconscious level. McDonald's red and yellow? Not a coincidence. What emotions do your brand colours trigger? Most marketers pick colours they like. Smart ones pick colours that work.
Tell stories, not stories about your product.
The most powerful neuromarketing tool available to any marketer, free of charge, is narrative. Emotional storytelling can lead to a 12% increase in purchase intent. Not because people love stories, but because the brain is literally wired to encode them differently than facts.
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A Note on the MENA Market
Working here in Doha, I see this play out in a particularly fascinating way. During Ramadan, the most significant marketing moment in the calendar for this region, the brands that consistently win are those that align their messaging with the core values of family, charity, and community, fostering genuine trust and loyalty rather than taking an opportunistic approach.
Google's 2025 marketing insights for MENA confirm what I observe on the ground every day: people across the region are engaging with content that blends dialects, crosses borders, and explores themes of identity and authenticity. What they're responding to is not polished ads or feature lists. It's a feeling.
That's neuromarketing in action, whether the brands know it or not.
The Honest Caveat
Neuromarketing is powerful. But it's also a responsibility. Using brain science to ethically connect with your audience and meet their genuine needs is good marketing. Using it to manipulate, deceive, or exploit psychological vulnerabilities is something else entirely, and increasingly, consumers are smart enough to feel the difference even when they can't articulate it.
The best brands use these principles to deserve the sale. That's the standard I hold myself to, and the one I'd challenge every marketer reading this to adopt.
The Question I'll Leave You With
Most marketing teams spend the bulk of their time on rational messaging, product specs, pricing tables, and comparison charts. And most of their campaigns underperform.
Meanwhile, the data is unambiguous: people buy with their feelings and defend the decision with facts.
So here's my challenge to you this week: look at your last campaign. Count how many seconds it takes before you hit an emotional trigger. If you're leading with features, you're already losing.
Sadick Mumin
Marketing Manager - Coreo Real Estate
