Why Dopamine Is Running Your Marketing Decisions Without You Knowing It
Every time you sign up for a new platform, something happens in your brain before you ever log in for the first time.
Your brain releases dopamine.
Not because the platform has delivered any results yet. Not because you have built anything or connected with anyone or generated a single dollar of revenue from it. Simply because you believe you are about to. Dopamine is not the reward for achieving something. It is the anticipation signal. It fires in the moment before you find out whether something worked.
This matters enormously for how you run your business. Because in a world designed to manufacture that feeling at industrial scale, dopamine is being triggered constantly. The new AI tool everyone is talking about. The course that promises to change everything. The rebrand that will finally make you feel ready. The strategy that worked for someone else and might work for you.
Each one arrives with a story attached. And each story triggers a small dopamine response. The feeling that this might be the thing.
Here is the problem.
That feeling is indistinguishable from progress.
The brain releases the same anticipation signal whether you are about to achieve something real or simply about to purchase the possibility of achieving something. Which means we are constantly chasing the feeling of moving forward without necessarily moving forward at all.
I have watched talented experienced entrepreneurs spend years in this cycle. Not because they lacked intelligence or discipline. Because the environment they were operating in was specifically designed to keep them in it.
The way out is not more discipline. It is understanding.
When you recognize dopamine at work in your own decisions, you can start asking a different question. Not does this feel like progress. But is this actually progress. Not does this feel urgent. But does this actually matter.
That shift changes everything about how you build a business.
Lisa Carmichael is the author of Marketing Dopamine: What Your Brain Is Really Doing When You Think You’re Building a Business. Learn more at lisarcarmichael.com
I like it! (as a proofreader, I’d like it better if the questions at the end were marked with quotation marks and question marks to make it obvious that they’re questions. 😉 ) eg. Not, ‘Does this feel like progress?’ etc.
*I can’t turn off my proofreader self, sorry…*
Thank you. I know the urge. I was torn because I felt like these were more like statements and not questions. I appreciate the feedback.
After years in Marketing, this made complete sense to me. And your comment: “Because the environment they were operating in was specifically designed to keep them in it.” I have seen this a lot, even in occupations like law enforcement that operate on corprate principles.
I get it. We need policies. We need a mission statement. We need a vision. But let’s stick to our values even when we’re having a bad day. Great point