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However, once the animal learns that the tone precedes the arrival of juice, the same neurons begin firing at the sound of the tone instead of the reward. Schultz calls these cells “prediction neurons” since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than receiving them. Once this pattern is memorised, the monkey’s dopamine neurons become exquisitely sensitive to variations on it. If the cellular predictions are correct, and the reward arrives right on time, then the primates experience a brief surge of dopamine, the pleasure of being right.’

These dopamine neuron signals are what allow us to make patterns and predictions in the real world. As long as the pattern is correct and the predicted reward follows, then we get our dopamine ‘fix’ and we feel good. So what does this mean for brand loyalty?

Well it seems reasonable to suggest that for brand-loyalists, their dopamine prediction pattern is that buying the brand gives them the reward of feeling good. And as long as the prediction of the reward is rewarded by ‘being right’, they’ll keep getting their dopamine.

There are however two other highly useful things to know about this in relation to buying behaviours and loyalty. Firstly there is the prediction error signal, which is how we learn what works and what doesn’t. If the event doesn’t produce the predicted reward, we don’t get the dopamine surge and so our sophisticated dopamine neuron predictive system flashes ‘error’. If we experience this error signal more than once or twice our predictive system starts to ‘look’ for rewards elsewhere.

This is what we refer to in NLP terms as cognitive dissonance or pattern interrupts. This is what we want to avoid doing to loyalists, but we certainly want to do with non-loyalists. We want to effect a prediction error signal on their choice of buying other brands or own label products.

How might we do this? The answer might be in another aspect of the dopamine reward system: the unpredictable reward.

Three or four times as much dopamine is released when an event produces an unexpected reward. The dopamine prediction error signal suddenly gets a nice surprise and then starts to pay attention to this thing that might create a reward again in the future. Is this why special offers work so well? An unexpected dopamine rush makes us feel soooo good. BUT if we want to maintain the effectiveness of the surprise, it has to be linked or anchored with something that will maintain the dopamine surge for the future; it has to create a new predictable pattern for that good feeling.

In other words a special offer may create the pattern interrupt we seek to get the non-loyals to shift, but something else has to happen as well to keep them and convert them to loyals. A series of dopamine rushes may be needed to get them ‘hooked’ again. This has interesting implications perhaps for the efficacy of certain marketing tactics and the sequencing of employing them.