I had the pleasure of joining Brian Crombie on The Brian Crombie Hour for a conversation about The Divided Brain and why people often make decisions before they can explain them logically.
Thank you to Brian for the thoughtful discussion and for giving the topic enough room to move beyond the usual surface-level marketing conversation.
You can find the replay hub here: https://briancrombie.com/podcasts-the-brian-crombie-hour/
The full video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uulYDqqWoT4
The direct audio is available here: https://soundcloud.com/user-412306973/paul-larche-divided-brain
Context is not background noise.
One of the central ideas we discussed is that context does not merely surround a decision. It helps create it.
That sounds simple, but it changes how we think about marketing, leadership, politics, branding and communication. Most organizations spend enormous time polishing the message itself. They work on the words, the offer, the tagline, the product comparison, the slide deck, the rational argument and the proof points. All of that matters. But none of it is received in isolation.
People receive a message inside a context.
They bring their own memories, assumptions, fears, hopes, habits and past experiences. They read the room. They notice cues. They sense whether something feels familiar or strange, safe or threatening, trustworthy or questionable. Often, that emotional appraisal begins before they have consciously evaluated the logic.
In The Divided Brain, I describe this through the relationship between the Old Brain and the New Brain. The Old Brain is fast, emotional and protective. It uses past experience and environmental cues to assess whether something feels familiar, safe or potentially threatening. The New Brain is more deliberate. It compares, explains, organizes and rationalizes.
The difficulty is that we often mistake the explanation for the original cause.
A person may say they chose the best value, the strongest argument, the most reasonable proposal or the product with the best features. Sometimes that is true. But often the Old Brain has already made an early judgment about safety, status, belonging, effort or risk. The New Brain then builds a story that makes the choice feel orderly and sensible.
That is why context matters so much. It is not decoration around the decision. It is part of the decision-making system.
The customer is not entering your meeting.
Inside an organization, everything becomes familiar. The team knows the backstory. They understand the acronyms. They remember why the product was built, why the campaign was written, why the pricing makes sense and why the message feels obvious.
But the customer is not living inside that internal context.
The customer may be seeing the brand for the first time, or through the memory of a bad past experience, or while distracted, uncertain, rushed, skeptical or overwhelmed. The same words can land very differently depending on the emotional and environmental cues surrounding them.
This is where familiarity becomes both powerful and dangerous. Familiarity can build trust because people relax around what they recognize. It lowers effort. It creates a sense of continuity. It can make a brand feel safer, easier and more human.
But familiarity can also trap a brand, leader or organization inside its own internal bubble. The team can confuse its own comfort with the customer’s confidence. It can assume that because something is clear internally, it must be clear externally. It can mistake internal repetition for market understanding.
That is how brands end up saying the right words and still being read the wrong way.
You see this in small moments. A website asks the visitor to do too much work. A proposal begins with the organization’s process instead of the customer’s problem. A leader introduces change by explaining the plan before acknowledging what people fear they may lose. A campaign uses language the team loves because it reflects the internal strategy, but the audience experiences it as vague, cold or self-important.
None of these mistakes are usually intentional. They happen because the internal context has become invisible to the people inside it.
Decisions are shaped before they are explained.
On the show, Brian and I talked about decision-making, emotion before logical explanation, cognitive biases, consumer behaviour, leadership, politics, successful brands and costly marketing mistakes. The common thread is that people do not make decisions as detached processors of information. They make decisions as humans trying to interpret signals, reduce uncertainty and protect themselves from risk.
A leader can present the right logic and still lose the room if people do not feel safe enough to listen. A campaign can test well internally and still fail externally because the surrounding cues create doubt. A brand can have a strong offer and still struggle if the customer’s first emotional reading is confusion, mistrust or indifference.
This does not make people irrational in the lazy sense of the word. It makes them adaptive. The Old Brain’s shortcuts helped human beings survive in uncertain environments. In modern life, those same shortcuts can misfire, especially when we are overloaded with messages, choices and competing claims.
The practical point is not to manipulate people. It is to understand them more honestly.
If context helps create the decision, then better branding has to do more than deliver information. It has to reduce unnecessary friction. It has to respect the customer’s starting point. It has to notice the emotional cues that surround the message before the rational argument begins.
This is also why the Old Brain and New Brain distinction is useful for leaders and marketers. It reminds us that people can understand a message and still resist it. They can see the evidence and still hesitate. They can agree with the logic and still feel that something is off. When that happens, adding more facts may not solve the problem. Sometimes the real work is to change the context so the facts can finally be received.
The question for brands is not only what are we saying.
The deeper question is what context are people receiving it in.
What do they already believe? What feels familiar? What feels risky? What does the environment signal? What are we assuming they know because we know it so well ourselves?
That is the conversation Brian and I explored, and it is one of the reasons I believe behavioural branding matters. Brands are not built only in the message. They are built in the interpretation of the message.
Listen or watch the replay, then consider where context and familiarity may be shaping the decisions your customers, teams, or audiences are making before they ever explain them logically.
Paul Larche is the author of The Divided Brain (CanReads 2026 Business/Marketing Winner | BookLife Prize 2025 Semifinalist, 10/10 Score, Editor’s Pick).