Subconscious Mind at Play

A novice’s take on human behaviour

For those who’ve been around in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay)and have seen the city transform from the Kaali Peeli’s (read as Taxi service) to the app based cab aggregators, would recollect seeing fleet of Kaali Peeli’s lit up with neon lights lined up at the Marine Drive promenade.

Most may not prefer taxis lit up with neon lights as default option of choice while looking to hop into one, but after a long stroll at the promenade with an exhausted body(and mind) the default choice could just be one of those neon ones.Reason as analysed by neuro-experts is Subconscious mind which is at play, deciding for us while the conscious mind is tired to take decisions.The subconscious mind invariably prefers a lit up taxi over a non lit up one.

Subconscious is identified by experts as a powerful layer underneath our conscious mind.It not only helps one dig into terabytes of data gathered in our brains over years but also drives our behaviour without us noticing it consciously.

When similar principle was brought to practise as a simple solution to solve for reducing fatalities due to track crossing at one of Mumbai’s local railway station the number of deaths reduced by almost 75% in a year.
Reference https://www.thefinalmile.com/railway-safety

Leverage by Digital Products

There are a lot more such examples of the usage of this principle in a non-digital space. However, we now find ourselves at a critical juncture in the evolution of our industries where we have digital solutions to a lot of our activities from past where almost all industries have caught onto the digital bandwagon in some form or the other. One such space that didn’t exist in the form of an organised sector earlier, but now has a lot of influence on us is ‘Social Media’.

While different industries try and deploy the principles of subconscious mind into their marketing strategy(which some experts call as neuro marketing) Social Media platforms actively leverage this in their product too in the form of features such as ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’ which are extensions to this principle.These are not only created to enhance user experience and to get new breed of users onboarded(thus driving growth for these products) but they also play a key role in ensuring customer retention through engagement.

Though it’s key for the rapidly evolving digital industry to tap into this aspect of human brain there are some findings which are seen as flip side to this approach.Going back to the Social Media example of using ‘Likes’ & ‘Comments’ the interactions with these features not only drive growth & retention, but also feed back into our subconscious state and goes onto the extent of influencing it as well.

For instance, some people start relating their value or worth to the number of ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’ received for a certain post they have put up online and slowly get into the habit of forming it as a practise for themselves. These habits start making our mind toxic, in the form of influencing our subconscious mind, the effects of which are long term.Though an individual’s value or worth does not decrease as a result of other people’s inabilities to see their worth, but subconsciously some of us start loosing sight of this and instead try to rely more on other people’s reactions on these platforms.

The below quote from ‘Florence Scovel Shinn’ aptly summaries this –
“If you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you.”

Success Driver

Whether it’s a digital product or a non-digital one, tapping into the power of subconscious mind successfully is not an easy task.It takes a lot of effort to inculcate that into our thought process of building the right product which not only drives the consumer consciously to the product but sub-consciously too.

The fact that we choose one digital product over the other(though they might be solving for similar problem space) or continue to eat at a particular outlet joint(for reasons beyond just taste) is a testament to the fact that there are activities happening within us in our subconscious mind without our awareness which is driving these decisions.

There are facets beyond subconscious behaviour that would drive product acceptance, but it is surely something which influences user behaviour.