The "Wow Effect" Is No Longer Enough: How Businesses Can Stay Successful in the Age of Rational Consumption

Int'l Business Times

15-07-2025

Innovator Olga Osokina on how AI has changed the relationship between consumers and brands, why emotional reactions matter, and what makes the Labubu case worth studying.
In recent years, the global trend toward conscious consumption has gained momentum. In 2025, its popularity surged—tens of thousands of people joined the No Buy 2025 initiative, aiming to go a year without impulsive or irrational purchases. And while this trend has a positive impact on the environment and mental health, it poses a challenge for businesses: traditional sales tools are losing effectiveness, and the cost of customer acquisition is rising rapidly.
Olga Osokina, CEO of UME Tech, has developed a fundamentally new approach to working with consumer behavior. She explores the intersections of artificial and biological intelligence, integrating neurobehavioral analytics and cognitive architecture into marketing, sales, and product development.
Olga is the winner of Innovator of the Year (International Business Award), Entrepreneur of the Year (Stevie Awards), and Innovation Leader of the Year (Global Innovation Online Awards, 2025). She also served as a judge at the Consumer Electronics Show alongside representatives from Meta, Amazon, and Netflix.
Previously, Olga founded Mirri—a sensory learning platform for children with autism spectrum disorders. The results of its use were presented at several scientific-practical conferences, including those on inclusive education. This experience became the starting point for developing the biointelligence model in the business environment. From Emotions to Decision-Making Neuropatterns
Olga Osokina notes that for a long time, marketing relied on the "wow effect" —the drive to trigger a strong emotional response. But today, that's no longer enough: "The modern consumer's brain has become 'immune' to one-sided stimuli. To achieve engagement, we need to understand how the brain processes emotions, visual signals, and price anchors. What works best is an emotional sine wave, a sequence of shifting states where peaks of interest alternate with relaxation and doubt. This dynamic is what activates conscious decisions, not impulses."
Under Olga's leadership, the UME Tech team conducted a series of behavioral tests involving 214 users in an e-commerce setting. During the experiment, the following were tracked: glucose levels via CGM (continuous glucose monitoring),
neural activation through wearable sensors,
behavioral data: clicks, scroll depth, response speed, and CTA choices.
The study was carried out in 2024 in partnership with experts in behavioral economics and neurophysiology. The pilot was not a clinical trial and was not intended for medical diagnosis; the goal was to validate hypotheses about how emotional scenarios influence behavioral engagement and motivation to act. All data was anonymized and collected in accordance with internal ethical standards of UX analytics.
"We found that when an emotional scenario is built on contrast—for example, an anxious audio background at the start followed by a visually warm scene—engagement increases by 23–26%. And not due to impulse, but due to internal confirmation of choice," Olga emphasizes. AI as a Barrier: How the Brain Resists Algorithms
Olga stresses that AI technologies, intended to enhance communication, are increasingly triggering subconscious resistance among consumers: "People intuitively sense when content is generated by an algorithm rather than a human. The sales funnel stops working, even if the communication appears personalized."
Osokina's team developed neuro-oriented engagement scenarios based on cognitive rhythm—not aggressive swings, but a deliberate activation of trust. This creates the sense of "I made this decision myself," instead of "I was manipulated." Digital Avatars and Neuro-Negotiation in B2B
In 2024, UME Tech introduced AI-avatar technology—digital brand ambassadors adapted to the audience's psychotype and cultural context. At launch, they helped companies nearly eliminate costs for paid audience acquisition.
"Later we scaled this approach to the B2B sector. By applying speech dynamics patterns, visual trust markers, and negotiation tempo, we helped clients increase average contract value by 15–20%," Olga shares. The Labubu Case: Not a Product, but a Symptom of the Environment
This case is presented not as a pop culture reference but as an example of how a product can resonate with the audience on a cultural and neural level.
Labubu demonstrates how a brand can become an interface of cultural tension. As Olga Osokina notes, its image is built on the principle of semantic incompleteness: it's both cute and strange, fluffy and toothy. This activates a projection mechanism—the consumer fills in the meaning themselves, triggering the effect of an unfinished gestalt.
Combined with a scarcity model (limited releases, exclusive collaborations), this creates predictive coding of desire. The toy tapped into already-heated themes—mental health, the inner child, and kidult culture—and became a neurosymbol of returning to oneself.
Even the packaging became part of the engagement: an ASMR effect when opening,
minimalist visual encoding,
tactile material—all of which activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with intuitive confidence.
"Labubu is not hype—it's an environmental marker. It's not sold—it resonates. This is a new type of product power," concludes Osokina. The Future Belongs to Cognitive Interfaces
According to Osokina, the cost of customer acquisition in 2025 has irreversibly increased and will continue to rise. The winners will be the brands that learn to activate not surface-level interest, but deep intention.
"The future lies in cognitive extrapolation. When a person lives their ordinary life, but the system has already 'heard' their desire. This is not manipulation, but a return to oneself through an interface," Osokina summarizes.
UME Tech's model is based on a multidisciplinary practice: behavioral economics, cognitive architecture, marketing, and AI analytics. It's at the intersection of these fields that solutions are born—not only adapting to the market, but anticipating its evolution.
Olga Osokina emphasizes: "It's important to note that I consciously use terminology from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence within the framework of applied humanistic analysis. These terms do not replace clinical or academic definitions—I respect the boundaries of each discipline. My goal is to integrate knowledge from adjacent fields to find practical solutions for business and society."