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

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