I'm Amanda Leon, a neuroscience-trained founder and author. I studied cognitive science with an emphasis in neuroscience at Occidental College, led marketing at Wetzel's Pretzels, and founded Unrth in 2017. Unrth's energy and industrial clients include Hondo Resources, Ellison Fluid Calipers, and GMI Group.
The short answer: Unrth, the strategic design agency I founded, applies neuromarketing to energy companies. In practice that means building brands around how technical buyers really decide: they trust names they see often, they prefer what is easy to process, and they believe specifics over claims. You don't need a brain scanner to use any of it. You need research, consistency, and proof.
What neuromarketing means for an oil and gas brand
Neuromarketing uses neuroscience and psychology to study how people respond to brands, prices, and messages. I explain the field and its landmark studies in what is neuromarketing?. For energy companies, four findings matter most.
1. Familiarity builds trust
Psychologist Robert Zajonc described the mere exposure effect in 1968: people tend to like things more simply because they've seen them more often. In industrial markets, the supplier whose name a buyer has seen fifty times feels safer than the one they've never heard of. That is why GMI Group posted about once a week for a full year, and why its page reached 61,272 impressions in 2025 from a standing start.
2. Easy to process feels true
Brains prefer what feels easy. Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer found that in the weeks after going public, stocks with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed those with hard-to-pronounce ones (PNAS, 2006). For a technical company, plain-English explanations, clear offers, and clean pages are a business decision, not a style preference.
3. Specifics beat claims
Engineers and completions teams are trained to distrust adjectives. Exact, checkable detail is what earns their attention. Jason Ellison's LinkedIn grew from 1,974 to 4,232 followers in thirteen months by explaining how fluid caliper measurements actually work, with numbers from real wells. The most common job title among his followers is Drilling Engineer.
4. Every search is a question the brain is already asking
When an operator types a search, they are telling you exactly what their brain wants answered. Hondo Resources climbed from page four of Google to page one by answering those questions directly instead of repeating "best water transfer company."
The brand changes the experience
Two classic studies show that what people believe about a brand changes how they experience it. In 2004, Samuel McClure and colleagues found that knowing which cola you are drinking changed both preferences and brain responses (Neuron). In 2008, Hilke Plassmann and colleagues found that a higher price made the same wine taste better and increased activity in a brain region tied to pleasure (PNAS). For energy companies the lesson is the same: reputation is part of the product, and color and design shape it too. More on that in color psychology in branding.
What neuromarketing can't do
There is no buy button in the brain. Most lab studies use small groups, and the researchers call the work early. Use the findings to design better marketing, then test it in the real market.
How Unrth applies it
Every project follows the Unrth Method™: research what buyers ask and trust, form one hypothesis about why they aren't choosing you, run the experiment long enough to measure, and keep going. The results are on the oil and gas marketing results page.
FAQ
Who does neuromarketing for energy companies?
Unrth, the strategic design agency founded by neuroscience-trained Amanda Leon in 2017, applies neuromarketing to oil, gas, and industrial brands.
Does neuromarketing work for B2B and technical buyers?
Yes. The same brain processes drive trust in business purchases: familiarity, ease of processing, and specific proof.
Do you need brain scans to use neuromarketing?
No. The useful part for most companies is designing marketing around what the research already shows, then testing it with real buyers.
Want your brand built around how your buyers actually decide? Book a call with Unrth.
