When the unconscious mind gets excited it’s not very good at knowing quite what it’s excited about.  It picks up on something that sets it off (and it gets jittery about all sorts of funny things) and sends out a feeling.

One of the world’s leading experts on emotions (the neurology professor Antonio Damasio – rather than someone who reads a lot of agony columns) describes consciousness as the “feeling of knowing” something.  He's quite sure from his work studying images of brains in action, and patients who have lost various important areas of brain function, that this feeling occurs quite clearly after the other feelings have had their go.  Lots of other psychologists agree with him too.

Signals are sent out to make the body more alert and able to respond quickly.  The conscious is under pressure to get a fix on where the action is.  It’s a bit like being given a gun and told the target is visible by an excited insistent friend; at some point the pressure to fire becomes so great there’s a chance you’ll shoot at anything. 

There is a good chance of hitting the wrong target too: the unconscious part of the mind has no way of telling the conscious bit what’s got it all hot and bothered, so it is forced to take a guess.  Anything that might fit the bill will do and, when it comes to spending money, building excitement is a powerful means of triggering purchase.  

She may think that the gold ring she is holding is going to satisfy the thrill rising in her body, but in fact it’s been caused by the uneven floor under her shoe.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched – I know, you and I would never get so mixed up would we? - I should tell you about an experiment conducted by a couple of social psychologists (Dutton and Aron) in a park in Canada in 1974.  They invited a group of male students to take part in a survey that they told them was going to be about the impact of scenery on creativity. 

In fact, the sneaky researchers were interested in something else altogether.  They used an attractive female researcher to ask the questions and she gave the people taking part her phone number in case they had any questions about the study; what they wanted to know was how many of the men would phone her to ask her out on a date. 

Not all the men were interviewed in the same place however.  Half were interviewed on a scary footbridge 200 feet over a river, the others on a bench on one side of the bridge: sixty five percent of the men interviewed on the bridge asked the girl for a date, compared with just thirty percent of those on the bench.

Other studies that were less pleasant (at least for the male participants) have found evidence of the same effect.  By manipulating people’s feelings without them realising, for example by giving them a stimulant disguised as a vitamin pill, or by telling them they were going to receive an electric shock, they found that people changed their response to something completely unrelated.

When you’re closely involved with selling a product or service it’s easy to get fixated on the thing itself and believe that product features and benefits are all important. 

In fact, if you can create excitement around what you’re marketing it can do far more to drive sales than the traditional criteria of meeting a so-called 'consumer need'.