The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (8 page)

You arrive at school 15 minutes after pick-up. Your children are sullen and angry. You drop your son off at the dentist’s, drive your daughter to soccer practice, leave to get your son, return to pick up your daughter. You didn’t see a moment of practice; you didn’t sit with your son at the dentist. Yet your brain craves the stimulation and comfort of their presence.

You return home at 5:45 p.m. to an empty refrigerator. You’ve been up for 12 hours and have not spent 15 minutes with either of your children. You P1: OTA/XYZ

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hurry them to their homework, phone for pizza delivery, and open your laptop to continue the work of the afternoon. After a 10-minute dinner break, you and your children move to separate rooms to complete your separate tasks. As a born connector, you feel uneasy, as you haven’t connected at all today with your children, your husband, or the friends upon whose empathy you depend.

At 9:00 p.m., you check homework and put the children to bed. You start a load of laundry and make calls for another parent to cover you (again) at pick-up. Your husband returns somewhere in the middle, and before returning to your separate work, you fill each other in (briefly). He makes a quick trip to the grocery store while you unload the dishwasher.

Exhausted, you fall into bed at midnight, and dream of symbolic threats and attacks as your brain struggles to make sense of your day.

Compared to her ancient predecessor, the modern female brain has much more on her plate. Her ability to maintain close, daily contact with a network of friends and family is severely hampered in today’s commuter society, full of two-earner households and “bedroom communities.” So what? Let your brand, product, or store become a networking hub for your prospects and customers. Provide your female customers with Twitter or Facebook updates and links, in-store cooking lessons, chat rooms, and other resources to help her feel more connected to her world—and your brand or product.

The Primal Brain in the Modern World

As these vignettes make clear,
it’s not always easy for a 100,000-year-old
brain
to make its way in the modern world. Exquisitely evolved to react to threats, danger, aggression, and to determine the true from false to avoid being deceived, our brains often find themselves in “emergency mode” simply due to the pace and overstimulation of modern life.

In fact, one school of thought wonders why our brains created environments for which they are ill-suited. Why, for example, would a highly-evolved, successful hominid create a world with the stressors ours embodies?

The answer, I’d argue, is that we are both ambitious and creative. We are not content with what is, and seek ever-better solutions. One could certainly argue that we’ve paid a high price for our creations, but we’ve also gained high rewards. Diseases have been eradicated, magnificent art has been created, the human genome has been decoded, and we can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, in seconds.

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So the question becomes, how do we
engage with the primal brain
—embedded deep within us—in this modern world? How do we soothe and seduce it? How do we send it messages that are important enough to be noticed and remembered? How do we stand out from the amazing barrage of sensory stimuli to be the one product or brand that makes sense and is embraced by the brain? How do we make life easier and more fun for this miracle of nature that’s perpetually on guard? More importantly, how do we start treating our customers as the smart, evolved people they are? With respect and dignity, compassion and caring, delivered in a way that invites and engages, but doesn’t overstimulate or alarm.

Until very recently, we’ve not had a way to learn “how the brain feels”

about the messages, products, packages, and shopping environments we create. But with game-changing improvements in EEG consumer testing and interpretation coinciding with huge leaps in computer algorithmic and analyses capabilities and, of course, the burst of knowledge and experience both have allowed us, we can now
know
with certainty, what the brain likes and what it rejects.

The brain is frustrated by:

r Tasks that take too long to resolve,

r Clutter, and

r Messages that distract or don’t apply.

The Neutral Brain

At their emotional core, the brains of modern humans are remarkably alike.

They respond similarly to key stimuli and react along the same lines to messages. The most primal, emotional sections of our brains react at a pure, precognitive level, in milliseconds. They are honest and unambiguous, unaffected by language, education, or culture. The universality of the human brain allows us to make highly accurate projections and draw extremely specific conclusions and recommendations based on the results we obtain from capturing and analyzing brainwave activity.

The brain can’t ignore:

Novelty
is the single most effective factor in effectively capturing its precious attention. Novelty recognition is a hard-wired survival tool all primates share. Whether looking for prey or berries or suitable mates, our brains are trained to look for something brilliant and new, something that stands out P1: OTA/XYZ

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The Buying Brain

from the landscape, something that looks delicious. A novel message, product, package, and/or layout is the key to penetrating their busy and selective subconscious minds. Breaking through the clutter in this way helps products stand out at the shelf and elevates a great logo from a sea of competing symbols and letters. To be embraced, a consumer touch point must first be noticed. (In Chapter 12 you can find more about novelty, how to achieve it, and what it means to the buying brain.)

Eye contact
is particularly important to a social species such as ours.

Activating challenge or empathy, depending on its depiction, displaying eyes is a certain way to gain the brain’s attention.

Pleasure/reward
images are irresistible to our brains. The trick is to find out exactly what those are, and exactly the best ways to present them to each consumer group. EEG testing in particular is moving this goal from pipe dream to reality every day.

Throughout this book, you’ll find dozens of additional, actionable tactics—based on years of brain analysis—to allow you to learn the secrets of every consumer’s brain, category by category.

But first, it is important to understand the workings of the brain itself.

Back from the Brink

As little as 70,000 years ago, there were as few as 2,000 mating pairs of humans. Driven to the brink of extinction by severe East African droughts during the years referred to as our evolutionary “bottleneck,” those en-dangered humans spanned out over hundreds of miles, innovating and adapting to survive. Eventually, their numbers recovered enough for the small isolated tribes to reunite and form larger, supportive and, sometimes, warring groups, punctuated by dynamism, stasis, and equilibrium. Today, there are 6.6 billion humans on every corner of the Earth (plus a dozen or so in space).

Here’s a summary of what we learned in this chapter:
r Engage the primal brain by honoring the brain’s precious resources—its limited processing ability, and its restricted, focused attention. The brain is determined to protect these resources. Make your interaction quick, clear, and interesting.

r Be interesting. The brain loves puzzles and humor.

r Use emotion to reach out to consumers, especially women.

r Clear your message of clutter. Use white space and clear, simple imagery and copy, particularly if your product lives in a crowded, loud category.

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r If your brand or product is likely to be part of some “goal-seeking behavior” use active, direct verbs to guide the brain swiftly and directly to its goal.

r If your brand or product is likely to activate pleasure/reward circuits, indulge the brain in messaging, images, displays, and environments that celebrate the sensuality and deep pleasure likely to be derived from use.

r Celebrate the multitasking wizardry of your female consumers in images and copy.

r Provide networking opportunities through your brand, product, or environment for female consumers.

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

r How the brain works and the process of engaging the brain.

r The structuring principles of the brain.

r How this will help you understand your customers’ wants and needs.

To apply neuroscience—the study of the brain—to the consumer marketplace, we must begin with a better understanding of the brain itself. Easily the most complicated organ, and one of the most complex systems in the universe, the human brain warrants lengthy tomes dedicated to its mysteries. For our purposes, however, allow me to provide you with an introductory tour of the brain and how it works in your daily life, in your relationships, in your business, and in the
why of what and how you and your customers buy.

In this decade after “the decade of the brain,” we have learned a great deal about how the brain works. Yet a great deal begs to be discovered: How does the brain produce the delightful individuality of human beings, their personalities, their talents? Where does the concept of “I” begin? Where does idea of “You” come in?

These lofty questions are zipping through your brain—alongside your shopping list and your knowledge of how to tie your shoes. Every behavior, every intention, every dream begins in the brain.

Brain Cells

So let’s begin at the beginning of our journey of understanding: the brain’s cells. The human brain is a network of a hundred billion individual cells, called neurons. Complex and intertwined, those neurons, each electrically charged, could be compared to an endless, sparkling display of stars across a clear, cold night sky. But the metaphor is incomplete. Imagine instead that every one of 33

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those stars is pulsing with electricity, communicating with other star systems through a complex interplay of electrical signals and brain chemicals. Now imagine that each star migrated to its particular place in the universe, pulled by its target system. Imagine further that every newly energized, purposeful star system sets in motion every aspect of your humanity, from breathing and balance, to creativity and insight, to charity and love. It sets us apart from all other species by allowing us to walk on the moon, to compose symphonies and sonnets, to fall in love, and to ponder the universe.

Neurons are the basic working units of the brain and the central nervous system,
designed to transmit information to other nerve, muscle, or gland cells.

Neurons consist of a
cell body, dendrites,
and an
axon
(see Figure 4.1).

The cell body contains the nucleus and cytoplasm of the cell. The electrically-excitable axon extends from the cell body to the target and often gives rise to many smaller branches called dendrites. These dendrites extend from the neuron cell body and receive messages from other neurons.
Synapses
are the contact points where one neuron communicates with another. So if you look at it from another vantage point, a neuron or a neural system is a one-way traffic light, receiving electrical impulses from another neuron, transporting them along the axon, and dispersing them at the target, where neurochemicals and electricity prompt or prohibit movement of that target. As neurons transmit
Figure 4.1

The working unit of the brain, a neuron.

dendrite

cell body

nucleus

axon

Source:
NeuroFocus, Inc.

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