The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind by A. K. Pradeep Read Free Book Online Page A

and leave early, again, to the disparaging expressions of your boss and teammates.
    Again, your brain warns you: Ostracism from the group is a dangerous consequence.
    You pile your electronics back into your car and repeat, quickly, the trek home. Constantly monitoring the time, you’re panicked, breathing shallow and fast. At every signal, you urge “Come on! Come on!”
    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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    The Buying Brain
    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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    Your Customer’s Brain Is 100,000 Years Old
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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