Updated 22 December 2025 — Charlie Thompson - Co-Convenor and Course Lead for CISL’s sustainable marketing online courses - introduces marketing’s brainprint. This article draws on Sustainable Marketing Foundations and Sustainable Marketing, Communications and Brand Management course materials

Humans are hard-wired to make sense of the world. Our brains look for patterns, connections, and structures in our environment to create meaning and understanding. Renowned psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl suggested the search for meaning to be a primary and intrinsic human motivation. And it’s served us well: playing a role in our evolution and survival by helping early humans adapt to their environment and cooperate in groups through shared beliefs, social norms, and cultural practices.

Over time, this meaning-making helped build communities that could collaborate more effectively, share resources, protect one another, anticipate danger, solve problems, and pass down knowledge. Meaning-making continues to help us navigate uncertainty, nurture social connections, find shared understanding, answer big questions, and create a sense of place, purpose, and stability. Our capacity for meaning-making shapes our individual and collective resilience, yet in some instances, it has also led to conflict and destruction.

Today’s culture has constructed meaning through consumption without considering the social and environmental dynamics surrounding this. Marketing is largely responsible for creating and continuing to fuel this culture of consumption and for shaping what it means for individual and collective meaning-making.

We are influenced by the messages we receive, the stories we hear, and how we individually and collectively absorb, make sense of, and act on them. Our consumer culture tells us we can gain meaning and status from the brands and things we buy and display. Marketing taps into our emotions, desires, and aspirations, framing products and services as symbols of identity, status, and personal fulfilment. Because of this, we assign meaning not just to the product or service itself, but to the story we think these things tell about who we are or who we want to be.

A pivotal moment came in the 20th Century with the work of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and lessons from wartime propaganda, Bernays showed companies how to link mass-produced goods to desires, aspirations, and self-concepts. This shift helped establish brands and goods as primary facilitators of meaning-making across society, with advertising and public relations steering our consumption patterns to become part of our present and aspirational identities.

In consumer societies, material values are deliberately nurtured and the narrative of meaning-through-consumption leads us to seek validation and belonging through interaction with the market. This is fuelled and encouraged by more than US$1 trillion in global marketing spend, most of which is devoted to sustaining consumer culture. As such, the meaning-making capacity that once supported our evolution, when trapped in this system, becomes the very thing that threatens our survival.

Defining “marketing’s brainprint”

The term “marketing’s brainprint” describes the psychological, sociological, and cultural influence of marketing activity. It captures the effect of marketing in influencing or reinforcing the beliefs, worldviews, identities, behaviours, norms, and desires held by individuals, groups, organisations, and the system at large.

Brainprint is not a marketing-only influence. Other economic and political actors are responsible for broader brainprint influence and reinforcement across the socio-economic system. In marketing, this influence has been achieved and amplified through evolving strategies, channels, and tactics that have been supercharged by evolutions in the technology industry with which it is closely intertwined.

The iceberg model from systems thinking helps illustrate why brainprint matters: most of what influences a system - mental models, underlying structures, and patterns and trends - lies below the surface. Marketing plays a major role in these hidden layers, shaping many social norms that feel innate today but were intentionally introduced. Examples include:

• The coffee break: In the 1950s, the Pan-American Coffee Bureau promoted coffee consumption by positioning the coffee break as a social and productivity-enhancing ritual. Today it’s a global norm.
   
• Normalising tobacco: 20th-Century cigarette advertising associated smoking with identity, celebrity, modernity, and even freedom and women’s liberation, contributing to widespread adoption.
   
• Diamond engagement rings: DeBeers’ tagline “A Diamond is Forever” helped create a now-universal cultural norm around diamond proposals that had not existed previously, shaping aspirations, desires, and expectations that continue today.

These examples show that marketing is not just driving economic transactions but shaping the meaning, social norms, and self-concepts surrounding them: creating brainprints. When such things are acted upon, they produce real-world footprints. Marketing’s brainprint influence is therefore an orchestrator of marketing’s footprint impact. It is both our attitudes and our actions that shape our connections and exchanges with the world.

Acting more like artists 

The examples above also illustrate that creative work can transcend the time it enters the market and society and have lasting consequences. To rebuild the beliefs, norms, and culture currently intertwined with the market - to create meaning beyond consumption and move us toward a different future - we need marketers to act more like artists.

In social change, artists have long played roles as:

• Truth tellers
• Emotional translators
• Visionaries and hope-wevers
• Culturale memory keepers
• Challengers of power
• Bridge builders
• Nature's ambassadaors
• Community catalysts

Every strategic or creative decision has the opportunity to reinforce sustainable or unsustainable beliefs, norms, narratives, and outcomes.

The brands of the future will be those that help people reconnect human identity with the natural world and realign what we perceive to be most valuable, aspirational, and desirable with outcomes that enable all living things to thrive.

The question that remains is simple: what kind of world will your work help create, and what meaning will it leave behind? To learn more about marketing’s brainprint, browse the Sustainable Marketing Foundations and Sustainable Marketing, Communications and Brand Management courses.

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