Brands must make use of the inclination of consumers to be persuaded by friends.

Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that more than 90% of them are gone from the shelf a year later.

Today's evangelism is just as likely to take place via chat rooms and viral videos as it is in a personal conversation or a sermon.

Imagine a smashed stained-glass window, a page torn from a Bible, or a snippet of choral singing. You would still recognize their religious roots, wouldn't you? In 1915, Coca-Cola designed a bottle so unique that if it were smashed into thousands of pieces, from a single shard of glass you'd still be able recognize the brand. We call such a device a Smashable. It can be anything from a color to a sound, from a pattern to a smell to an icon.

If you were to close your eyes and walk into a place of worship, the sounds and smells would alert you to where you were: ringing bells, incense, the rumble of a massive organ. Most brands are lacking these sensory stimuli.

Spinning out of my neuromarketing work where, based on scanning the brains of 2,000 respondents' brains using fMRI, we learned that there's a huge correlation between religion and branding - and thus the way that brands intend to generate customer evangelism are to be constructed.

Thus ideas like subliminal advertising today rarely works and or even exists.