Dopamine 101 for Marketers


What does dopamine have to do with marketing?
Marketing is about websites, social media, advertising, email, branding, networking, and sales. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. What does one have to do with the other?
More than I ever imagined.
Neuroscience has intrigued me ever since I picked up Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. His writing about the brain, repeated behaviors, and our ability to create new patterns made me think differently about the habits we develop without even realizing it.
My book didn’t begin as Marketing Dopamine. It began as Behavior-Based Marketing Strategy. I was trying to understand why capable business owners kept abandoning marketing strategies that had the potential to work in favor of the next promising tool, tactic, course, platform, or idea.
The more I explored that behavior, the more curious I became. Why was it so easy to feel excited about starting something new, yet so difficult to stay focused long enough to see the current strategy through?

What if the biggest obstacle to your marketing success isn’t the strategy itself? What if it’s your own behavior?

Connecting the Dots?

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain. Think of it as a chemical messenger that helps nerve cells communicate with one another. It’s widely known as a “feel-good” chemical, but that description doesn’t tell the whole story.
Dopamine plays an important role in motivation, learning, anticipation, reward, and movement. It helps drive the brain’s reward system and encourages us to pursue goals, explore new ideas, check for updates, and continue seeking what might come next.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Dopamine helps us move forward. It supports our curiosity, creativity, and motivation. Without it, we probably wouldn’t pursue new goals, build businesses, or remain interested enough to keep learning.
The challenge begins when the excitement of discovering something new repeatedly pulls us away from finishing what we’ve already started.

The challenge isn’t dopamine. It’s becoming more committed to novelty than consistency.

When the Next New Thing Becomes the Distraction

I recognized this pattern in my own business. Whenever something wasn’t working as quickly as I hoped, I found myself searching for the next course, the next AI tool, the next social media strategy, or the next marketing expert. Starting something new felt exciting. Staying with the current plan, especially when results were slow, often felt uncomfortable.
Sometimes exploring something new was also a way to avoid the disappointment of what wasn’t working. The excitement gave me somewhere else to direct my attention. But every time I changed direction, I moved farther away from the finish line I had already been working toward.
The deeper I looked into neuroscience and human behavior, the more dopamine kept appearing as an important piece of the puzzle. It wasn’t the entire answer, but it helped me understand why anticipation, novelty, and the promise of something better can be so difficult to resist.
That’s when Behavior-Based Marketing Strategy became Marketing Dopamine.

What This Means for Your Marketing

Advertising works. Building trust works. Email marketing, networking, speaking, social media, video, and SEO can all work. The problem usually isn’t that every strategy has failed. The problem is that we often lose focus before the strategy has enough time, consistency, or support to produce results.
We convince ourselves the answer must be another course, another tool, another funnel, another platform, or another expert with a secret we’ve somehow missed. Sometimes those resources are valuable and exactly what we need. Other times, they’re distractions that keep us from consistently doing the work that already has the potential to move us forward.
That’s one of the reasons I created the Marketing Dopamine workbook. I wanted business owners to have a practical way to recognize when excitement, frustration, or the pull of the next shiny idea is leading them away from the strategy they’ve already committed to.
New ideas aren’t the enemy. But unfinished ideas rarely produce results.

The problem may not be your marketing strategy. The problem may be abandoning it before it has time to work.

A Better Question

Instead of automatically asking, “What’s the next marketing strategy I should try?” it may be more helpful to ask, “Have I given my current strategy enough time and consistent effort to work?”
Building trust isn’t always exciting. Consistency doesn’t always provide the immediate reward of discovering something new. But trust and consistency create something that novelty alone cannot: momentum.
Understanding dopamine doesn’t mean avoiding new ideas or refusing to change direction. It means becoming more aware of what’s driving the decision. Sometimes the next step is a better strategy. Other times, the next step is simply staying focused long enough to reach the finish line.

Lisa Carmichael is the author of Marketing Dopamine: What Your Brain Is Really Doing When You Think You’re Building a Business. Follow along as she shares the ideas behind the book at lisarcarmichael.com.