The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (3 page)

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-60177-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-470-64684-7 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-470-64678-6 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-470-64661-8 (ebk)

1. Neuromarketing.

2. Consumer behavior.

3. Shopping–Psychological aspects.

4. Marketing–Psychological aspects.

I. Title.

HF5415.12615.P73 2010

658.8 342–dc22

2010003830

Printed in the United States of America.

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For my dear children, Alexis, Shane, and Devin,
whose intelligence and laughter light up my life.

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Contents

Foreword

ix

Part 1

Introducing the Buying Brain

$1 Trillion to Persuade the Brain

3

7

Your Customer’s Brain Is 100,000 Years Old

17

33

The Five Senses and the Buying Brain

41

The Boomer Brain Is Buying

55

The Female Brain Is Buying

65

The Mommy Brain Is Buying

79

The Empathic Brain Is Buying

93

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Contents

Chapter 10

Neuromarketing Measures and Metrics

103

113

The Buying Brain and Brands

119

The Buying Brain and Products

135

The Buying Brain and Packaging

155

The Buying Brain in the Aisle

171

The Buying Brain and Advertising

193

The Buying Brain, Screens, and Social Media

219

231

Notes and Sources

237

Index

247

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Foreword

As a professional marketing strategist, my

entire career has been about getting into the heads of buyers. I’ve used tools that are familiar to generations of marketers, conducting primary research about my buyers by interviewing them, and drawing on secondary sources such as analysts’ opinions and studies. Then, armed with that information, I’ve directed my teams of both staffers and agencies to create advertisements, websites, or trade show booths and tested these efforts via a focus group or A/B testing.

Damn, I thought I was really doing it right—until I read
The Buying Brain
, that is.

In these pages, I learned that I’ve been focused for all these years on just a tiny part of my buyers’ brains! Like most marketers, I’ve been obsessing over the tip of the iceberg—that part of the consumer that we can see, touch, and hear.

I’ve asked questions designed to probe consumers’
conscious
minds. But the answers to questions like “Do you like this ad?” and “When I mention this brand, what animal do you think of ?” and “Would you prefer red or green for that button?” seem downright quaint when compared to the potential fruits of probing the enormous activity in buyers’
subconscious
brains.

In this remarkable book, Dr. A. K. Pradeep shows us that as many as 95

percent of buyer decisions are made by the subconscious mind. Yes, you read that correctly!

Use of the word
secret
in many marketing book titles is an exaggeration at best and a fabrication at worst. But that accusation is absolutely untrue of
The Buying Brain: Secrets of Selling to the Subconscious Mind
, because this book unlocked mysteries for me (a reasonably knowledgeable marketing author and practitioner) in every chapter. I learned that there are differences between male and female brains that have profound importance to marketers. I learned that your brain changes with age, and knowing the nature of this transition can make your marketing to various age groups come alive. I even learned how to market effectively to new mothers (yup, her brain changes, too).

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Foreword

Because Pradeep is the guiding force behind the world’s top neuromarketing lab, many of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies are using his ideas. These companies are applying the latest advances in neuroscience to create brands, products, websites, package designs, marketing campaigns, store environments, and more.

Now these powerful neuromarketing ideas are available to you in this engaging and easy-to-digest book.

Marketers have known for years that if you understand the human brain, you will design better offerings, create better marketing, and sell more products.

Now, finally, marketers possess a more complete understanding of the entire human brain.

—David Meerman Scott

BusinessWeek
best-selling author of

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

www.WebInkNow.com

twitter.com/dmscott

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Many people were involved not only in

creating this book, but in creating the new field of neuromarketing. They are: All the clients of NeuroFocus, who gave us the opportunity to explore previously unchartered domains of knowledge.

The employees of NeuroFocus across the globe, whose amazing brilliance and insanely hard work made the extraction of these insights possible. Special thanks to Julie Penfold and Tom Robbins, whose literary magic wands transformed these insights into the right words and stories to bring them to life on these pages.

Dr. Robert Knight for unlocking the mysteries of the human brain and clearing a pathway to bring neuroscience to the world of business.

Ram and Dev for creating the technical infrastructure that made these insights possible. Caroline Winnett, Russ Dunham, Andrew Pohlmann, Deepak Varma, Joakim Kalvenes, Steve Miller, and Steve Genco for our fruitful debates on the frameworks and ideas behind this book. Michal Levinson and Karthik Kasinathan for their exceptional mastery of data collection and analysis. Jack Lester for minding the store while I worked on this book. Ronen Gadot and Felipe Jaramillo for helping to bring NeuroFocus around the globe. Oksana Teicholz for her beautiful cover design. NeuroFocus marketing for getting this book out of my computer and onto these pages. Ajit Nazre, Ray Lane, and John Doerr for strengthening my resolve to make NeuroFocus a brilliant success. Al Gula and Jim Johnson, who helped me early on when the field of neuromarketing did not yet exist.

The NeuroFocus Advisory Board, for their outstanding contributions to the very foundations of everything we do.

Dave Calhoun, Thom Mastrelli, John Burbank, Itzhak Fisher, Cindy Shin, Dave Harkness, Susan Whiting, Dave Thomas, and Frank Stagliano for being great partners.

Jaya Kumar, Ann Mukherjee, Pam Forbus, Michelle Adams, Christine Kalvenes, Jack Marquardt, Steve Springfield, Craig Wynett, Ricardo Hungria, xi

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Efrain Rosario, Betsie Kasner, Stan Sthanunathan, David Poltrack, Mel Berning, Frank Cooper, Alan Wurtzel, Horst Stipp, Peter Leimbach, Jon Mandel, Chris Moloney, Yong Park, Dermot Boden, Kwanwoo Nam, Gregory Lee, Byung Do Yoon, Patricia Roxas, Robert Atencio, Ramon Portilla, Rick Smith, the Advertising Research Foundation, and Jack Wakshlag for their ideas and inspiration.

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THE BUYING

BRAIN

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the Buying Brain

Source
: Photo by BigStock.com

Understanding the human mind in biological terms has emerged as the central challenge of science in the twenty-first century.

—Dr. Eric Kandel, Neuroscientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine; NeuroFocus Advisory Board Member.

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$1 Trillion to Persuade

the Brain

Millions of people in our global econ-

omy have jobs that depend on communicating with and persuading human brains. A trillion dollars is spent on this effort every year.

Yet few of us understand how all those human brains really work—what is attractive to them, how they decide what they like and don’t like, or how they decide to buy or not buy the infinite variety of products and services presented for their consideration every day.

This book is about
how and why brains buy
. It dips into a wellspring of new knowledge that has been pouring out of the neurosciences over the last few decades, especially the last five years, and describes actionable insights for businesspeople and marketers that can be derived from that knowledge and applied directly to the global industry of persuasion.

These are remarkable times. It is a rare event when a science, its enabling technology, and a set of real, practical problems come together all at once to revolutionize and expand our capabilities in the world. It happened with chemistry in the eighteenth century, physics in the nineteenth century, mi-crobiology in the twentieth century, and now neuroscience in the twenty-first century. As Charlie Rose said in a recent series of interviews devoted to the neurosciences, “we have learned more about the brain in the last five years than in all human history combined.”

I am lucky to be surrounded by the best neuroscience team in the world to help me understand these developments and I am going to share them with you in this book.

What have we learned?

The basic lesson is that human brains process much of their sensory input subconsciously. This is, of course, counterintuitive because we can’t think 3

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The Buying Brain

about how we think when we’re not aware of the thinking we’re thinking about! But the basic fact is undeniable and is validated by literally thousands of scientific studies. Most of the work our brains are doing day and night occurs below the threshold of our personal conscious awareness. Imagine all the work your brain was doing (that you weren’t aware of) just decoding the second sentence in this paragraph!

Scientists have tried to express the ratio of subconscious to conscious brain activity in many ways. I like the formulation I first came across in Timothy Wilson’s book,
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
.

Our senses are taking in about 11 million bits of information
every second. Most of that comes through our eyes, but all the other senses are contributing as well—hearing, touch, smell, taste, and spatial sensations. Our conscious brains—that part of thinking in which we are aware of thinking—can only process, at best, 40 bits of information per second. All the rest is processed subconsciously. That’s a ratio, if I’m doing my math correctly, of 99.999 percent subconscious to conscious processing. No wonder our brains often appear to be a mystery to us.