Did you ever been in the embarrassing situation of not being able to buy no-name over a brand-name product while being attracted more to the first? Feeling somehow conditioned into buying the brand-name and still being happy with the purchase?

What is this, snobbery? Hypnosis?

No, no. We’re emotionally bound to brands. Clothes, ice-cream or phones, brands are hard-wired in our brains:

« Neuroscience has now confirmed what we had suspected all along: If you like Coke over Pepsi, it’s all in your head. For that branding breakthrough, we can thank Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, who cooked up an experiment to keep his teenage daughter occupied as she helped out in his lab last summer. Montague wired up a group of volunteers and re-created the Pepsi challenge while monitoring their brain activity on an MRI. The results were astonishing. In blind taste tests, subjects’ brains indicated a clear preference for Pepsi. But when they were told which of the samples was which, their brains switched brands. “The brand image of Coke in the nervous systems of the people we tested engaged systems in charge of cognitive control and commandeered their behavior,” Montague says. In short, the power of the Coke brand was enough to override an objective preference. » [Fast Company issue 85, The Good Brand by Linda Tischler]