The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (22 page)

If anything, the emotional Mirror Neuron system is even more powerful than the sensory/motor Mirror Neuron system. Use your consumer’s desire to connect with each other by offering them chances to see and
feel
things as others experience them. This is most powerfully a visual/auditory effect, best suited for television, movies, radio, and print editorial. Even so, reading the word “sniff” in the proper context may cause you to do just that. Or “itch,” “stretch,” “swallow,” or any of a hundred common activities you could perform while reading.

There is now considerable evidence that perceiving language activates corresponding motor and/or perceptual areas. For example,
He kicked the ball
activates the foot area of the primary motor cortex, while hearing the word

“jump” activates brain areas related to leg movement.

We’ve known for a long time that visualization (imagining oneself completing an important task, particularly widespread in sports coaching) improves performance. Olympians and professional athletes attest to the power of thinking through each stage of their performance before it happens. We’re learning now that watching others perform the task you’re about to undertake also improves performance. How this is done P1: OTA/XYZ

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is by recruiting the powerful Mirror Neuron system. When athletes or others who practice the sport or play the music watch a master in action, their performance actually improves. The more they watch their specific area of interest, the more they improve. The only drawback is watching virtuoso performances by Serena Williams or Michael Phelps improves performance only in bodies that actually DO similar activities, although all brains will fire while watching. Unfortunately, if “weekend warriors”

watch Serena or Michael, the appropriate areas of the brain will fire, but, alas, there will be no improvement in performance.

Mirror, Mirror, in My Mind

Mirror Neurons operate in your subconscious.
They absorb the culture, experiences, feelings, and actions of those around you—and you are changed.

At the same time, your actions and emotions feed and change those around you—and they, too, are changed. Mirror Neurons for emotion reading and empathy reside in two areas deep inside the cortex: the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. People with the greatest empathy have more gray matter in their right frontal insulas. The thicker this part of your insula, the better you are at reading feelings in yourself and others.

Your MNS operates all the time; you can’t turn it off.

So when you see fear on another’s face, you feel fear. When you see calm, you feel calm. When you see pain you feel pain, boredom equals boredom, yawn equals yawn, and so on.
Women have more active Mirror Neuron
activity
in general than men do. (Greater empathy aids successful childbearing.

See Chapter 8 for more on the Mommy Brain.)

The amazing and still-to-be-discovered facets of the MNS are not found in all
species and appear to be related to those species with elevated consciousness: great
apes (including us), elephants, and whales.

One spectacular variety, Von Economo cells, are highly-connected neurons that enable us to make fast, intuitive judgments for quick and ready insight.

These are the neurons that are working when you don’t know how you know, you just “know.” These cells involved in helping you make snap decisions that are more than the flip of the coin. They come from judgment stored, but rarely accessed. Von Economo neurons are larger than most neurons and

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The Buying Brain

contain chemicals involved in social bonds, the expectation of reward, and detecting danger.

Mirror Neurons work all day, every day, in many ways you may not have noticed, for example:

r Seeing your child get a shot causes the parent to wince r Watching a close partner handle a stressful conversation can cause your blood pressure to rise

r Seeing a bicyclist zoom down a hill will elevate your heart rate and give you a feeling of alertness and possibly even a mirrored endorphin jolt r Helping an injured person can cause you to hold your own body as if it were injured

r Seeing a colleague win a deal activates your success and reward pathways, too

Radio and voiceovers
offer plenty of opportunities to engage the Mirror Neuron system. National Public Radio (NPR) is particularly adept at including noises that draw lis-teners into the activity: a slamming door, a cat meowing, traffic noises.

Anything that makes a viewer feel as if he or she is “there” will ignite Mirror Neurons, increase interest, and perhaps even prompt purchase.

This chapter introduces bright new research on the Mirror Neuron system.

These specialized neurons are the markers of
great empathy
in humans and stimulate a “monkey see, monkey do” effect. Oftentimes, these neurons fire in the brain simply by watching, reading, or even thinking about an action. In the same way a yawn spreads around the conference room, think of the many ways you can use action and emotion to ignite the Mirror Neuron system in your consumer’s minds and bring them subconsciously straight into the experience of your brand or product.

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the Buying Brain

Source:
NeuroFocus, Inc.

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and Metrics

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r The three primary NeuroMetrics used to assess the neurological effectiveness of stimuli, and how they combine to deliver an Overall Effectiveness Score

r The three Market Performance Indicators that are derived from the primary NeuroMetrics

r Why the Deep Subconscious Response methodology is such a powerful tool to identify and quantify brand attributes In the chapters that follow, I am going to take you on an unprecedented tour into the five major areas of neuromarketing practice at NeuroFocus: brands, products, packaging, advertising, and in-store marketing.

In doing so, we are going to have many chances to talk about a toolkit of metrics—we call them NeuroMetrics—that we have developed to better understand how our brains process and respond to all these aspects of marketing. These NeuroMetrics represent the building blocks of our business and, as such, I would like to introduce them to you here.

My purpose is not to get into a deeply scientific discussion. I assume you are not a neuroscientist, nor do you want to become one just to understand how neuromarketing works. But, I do want you to appreciate that a tremendous amount of scientific effort has gone into the formulation and development of these metrics, and that they are based on established procedures, principles, and findings that have been honed in research labs around the globe and published in some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world.

NeuroFocus has developed three primary NeuroMetrics, three derived NeuroMetrics, and one summary NeuroMetric. The primary NeuroMetrics 103

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The Buying Brain

measure
Attention
,
Emotional Engagement
, and
Memory
. The three derived NeuroMetrics measure
Purchase Intent/Persuasion
,
Novelty
, and
Awareness/

Understanding/Comprehension
. The summary NeuroMetric we simply call

Effectiveness.

We are also going to discuss a more general methodology that you will encounter in the next few chapters: our
Deep Subconscious Response
(DSR) methodology.

We are developing new NeuroMetrics and methodologies all the time.

These are the foundational elements underlying the work and insights I am going to share with you in the following chapters.

Attention

The first question clients ask me about their ads or movie trailers or products on the shelf is: Are people noticing us? And this is exactly the right question to ask, because attention is the starting point of all marketing.

The brain is actually pretty amenable to letting you know when it is paying attention—provided you know where (and when) to look. As I’ve described in earlier chapters, the brain operates largely through electrical activity. As different clusters of neurons fire in unison, they create measurable electrical brainwaves at consistent frequencies. These electrical waves are the literal mechanisms of communication among regions of the brain. Electrical activity begins at particular frequencies; this excites other neurons, and the brain is soon humming along with coordinated patterns of oscillating electrical rhythms within and between different regions. All this activity shows up at the scalp and is picked up by our EEG sensors. Powerful analytical algorithms then process and decompose these signals into their constituent parts, and the logic of the brain’s operations is revealed.

Attention is a fundamental function of the brain
and produces a distinctive pattern of brainwave activity. Our Attention NeuroMetric is based on the moment-to-moment fluctuations of these brainwave patterns. The result is a relative measure that tracks how Attention waxes and wanes on a subsecond-by-subsecond basis.

People know when they are paying attention to something. They are actively

“thinking about it.” However, people do not have access to the predecessor processes that lead up to Attention. In other words, we don’t know when we’re about to become attentive to something, so we often don’t know what stimulus has just caused us to begin paying attention. Only a brain-based NeuroMetric can pinpoint precisely what aspect of a message triggered Attention.

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Emotional Engagement

Emotional Engagement, like Attention, can
wax and wane
over time. Although our conscious perceptions of emotion feel consistent, at a subconscious level our brains are constantly updating our emotional engagement with the world around us.

So Emotion, too, as we measure it, is a moment-by-moment phenomenon.

Our Emotional Engagement NeuroMetric primarily tracks emotional arousal. This is the tendency of our brains and nervous systems to be more or less activated by the stimuli we come in contact with. Other words often used as synonyms for arousal are excitation, excitement, stimulation, or intensity of experience. These emotions are fundamental precursors of intentions, attitudes, decisions, and behaviors.

For stimuli like TV and print ads, or displays in a grocery store, Emotional Engagement represents
the connection we feel
toward what we are experiencing at a moment in time. How this connection plays out over time (is it consistently rising? consistently falling? fluctuating up and down?) is a key indicator of how a person is reacting to an unfolding story or message.