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Dear {{ first name | Legend}},

I hope you’re sitting down for today’s issue, get ready to have your mind blown. 🤯

A few weeks ago, I had a deep conversation with Pranav Yadav and this one quote made me rethink what I thought I knew about the way we remember and why we buy.

The attention economy, so often touted by marketers as the end all be all, just got demolished.

Billions of dollars each year are spent on capturing attention, holding attention, monetizing attention, as more and more content explode onto our smartphones. But what if marketers got it all wrong? What if the battle ground isn’t attention? It’s memory?

(Pranav is the founder and CEO of Neuro-Insight U.S., the leading neuroanalytics firm decoding how the brain responds to marketing, storytelling, and culture. He’s hailed as the neuroscientist to the Forbes CMO council and has been named one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.”)

Picture yourself standing in the snack aisle.
Two brands.
Same price.
Different feeling.

You reach for one without thinking.

Why that one?
You might tell yourself it’s because of taste, habit, packaging.
But neuroscience shows otherwise.

Our choices are guided by stored memory structures — emotional traces of past experiences that the brain uses to predict what will feel good, safe, or rewarding.
The moment your hand moves toward the shelf, your conscious mind is just catching up to what your memory already decided.

This is the same decision when you decide on which coach to hire, which course to buy, who to promote?

And the crazy thing is we don’t know what we remember.

When Pranav said, “Most of the memories that influence us are formed subconsciously,” he wasn’t being poetic. He was being literal.

Our brains are constantly encoding — second by second — deciding what deserves storage. But those decisions happen automatically, far below the level of conscious thought.

You don’t know it’s happening.
You don’t feel it happening.
Yet those stored fragments become the invisible scaffolding of your future behavior.

So when you see an offer, meet a brand, or walk into a meeting, your brain isn’t starting from a blank slate. It’s checking against a deep archive of subconscious associations — emotional residues that whisper, “trust this,” or “avoid that.”

That means most “persuasion” doesn’t happen in the moment of decision. It happens earlier, when the memory was formed often when you weren’t even paying attention.

And it also means that it’s kind of worthless to ask someone if they’d want to buy something or not, asking their conscious brain what their subconscious memory provides.

We treat memory like a filing cabinet: neat, chronological, accurate. But it isn’t.

Memory is reconstructive. It’s fluid, emotional, and constantly rewritten. Each recall blends the fact with the feeling. That’s why Pranav calls memory “a highlight reel, not a replay.”

The brain saves what feels important, not what is important. Which means the work of influence isn’t to fill minds with information — it’s to shape the moments the brain decides to save, and feed it in the only language that brain understands…

STORY

Story links cause and effect, emotion and meaning. It’s how the mind compresses chaos into something it can remember.

So when you’re creating anything — a campaign, a speech, a message to your team — the question isn’t “Is this clear?”

It’s “Does this feel like a story my brain wants to keep?”

And the brain only keeps things that hit two buttons: Relevance and Emotion.

This is what Neuro-Insight’s data proves. After scanning thousands of ads and experiences, they found the correlations that actually predict long-term memory encoding — and therefore, behavior:

Pranav calls this the REM Loop — Relevance → Emotion → Memory.
That loop is the quiet engine behind every future action.

So how can we use this to influence behavior?

Corporate Leader:
You’re announcing a new company vision. Instead of a PowerPoint full of metrics, start with a personal story, a real moment that captures why this matters to you.
When employees hear something that reflects their own aspirations or fears, the brain says, “this is for me.”

Marketer:
You’re launching a sustainability campaign to get people to develop eco-friendly habits. Don’t start with data about carbon emissions. Start with the story of one everyday habit that mirrors your audience’s life, like the first coffee cup of the morning. Make it about them, not about you.

Corporate Leader:
During a town hall, don’t just explain the new strategy, stage an emotional moment. Maybe share the story of a customer who was impacted by the company’s work, or show a short video that evokes pride. Emotion acts as the “save” button for memory.

Marketer:
If you’re creating an ad or social content, identify one core emotion: say, relief instead of “innovation.” Show the moment that feels like relief (a sigh, a slow breath, a smile). That’s what gets stored.

Corporate Leader:
When you present, plan for one peak and one ending. The peak is the moment of surprise or recognition: the “aha.” The ending is the emotional close that gives the talk shape. Everything else is scaffolding. Memory stores moments, not duration.

Marketer:
In video, identify your peak moment. Maybe it’s the laugh, the reveal, the flash of beauty and place your brand near or during that second. That’s when emotional energy is highest, and association strongest.

(Scroll to the bottom of this issue about the Peak-End Rule.)

Corporate Leader:
Choose one symbolic cue that people can reuse — a phrase, a gesture, an object — and repeat it consistently. If your company is turning a corner, literally bring a compass or key to your next talk. Those physical anchors later trigger the same emotional memory.

Marketer:
Define a distinctive asset — a sound, color, logo or line that re-activates prior emotional memory. Cadbury’s purple, Nike’s swoosh, McDonald’s jingle, these aren’t decoration; they’re retrieval bridges. When people encounter them, the stored emotion replays.

For the nerds (like me 😅) 👇🏽

2007

A gorilla sits behind a drum kit.

Listening intently to “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.

Gentle concentration leads to energetic drumming.

For 90 seconds, no chocolate, no copy, no call-to-action.

(Over 11 million views: watch here)

Marketers panicked. “Where’s the product? It’s gonna fail!”

Consumers, meanwhile, couldn’t look away.

When Neuro-Insight measured the ad, memory encoding spiked twice:
once when the gorilla started drumming, again when the Cadbury purple appeared.

That second spike proved that the emotion from the music transferred to the brand.
The feeling of joy became the memory of Cadbury.

Even today, people can’t quote the ad, but they smile when they see Cadbury’s purple.
That’s subconscious memory, alive and well.

If you like this issue, you’ll love:

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

​Read my story​

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The Influence Anyone Podcast

In this episode, Pranav Yadav, founder and CEO of Neuro-Insight U.S., reveals why the future of influence isn’t about attention — it’s about memory.

He takes you inside the neuroscience that changes everything: from the REM Loop, where he explains how relevance and emotion combine to encode memory (and drive behavior subconsciously); to the Memory Economy, which proves most of our decisions are made below awareness; to McDonald’s “Raise Your Arches” campaign, where a wordless eyebrow-raise triggered one of the strongest memory-encoding spikes ever recorded, showing that even subtle, story-rich cues can move behavior without overt persuasion.

You’ll walk away seeing influence through a different lens and understanding why people don’t act on what they notice, but on what their brains quietly decide to store.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Pranav Yadav on Apple, Spotify, the Web, or wherever you get your podcasts.