Crack the Customer Mind Code
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Crack the Customer Mind Code

Seven Pathways from Head to Heart to Yes!

Gary Hennerberg

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eBook - ePub

Crack the Customer Mind Code

Seven Pathways from Head to Heart to Yes!

Gary Hennerberg

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About This Book

Crack the Customer Mind Code upendscustomarymarketingapproaches and takes a deeper approach to more successful selling.Based on an analysis ofsuccessful marketing campaign patterns, Crack the Customer Mind Code teachesthe reader how to align marketingmessages that leveragethe mind'snatural progressionto "yes" through seven steps: 1) identify the persona, 2) stimulate emotion, 3) calm the mind, 4) position or reposition, 5) engage with story, 6) interpret the outcome, and 7) lead prospective customersto give themselvespermission to act. With this proven process, organizations cancreatestronger sales-producingmarketingcampaigns when the messageis aligned withthe way in whichmarketinginformation is absorbedand processed.

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Information

Year
2016
ISBN
9781630476991
Subtopic
Marketing

CHAPTER 1

THE MIND AND THREE IMPERATIVES

In an “always-on” culture, you and your prospects may be juggling multiple media stimuli at any one time.
Assuming you’re like most people in these times, you’re multitasking on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, TV, or other media device. And so are your prospects. Intuition tells us that it’s tough to media multitask, that is, to simultaneously use two or more media devices. If you’ve done it, you know you’re not completely present with any one of the devices. Rather, your focus diverts from one media to the other, resulting in missing pieces from both stimuli.
It’s been proven that the brain cannot multitask. People aren’t wired that way. In an awareness test experiment as reported in LiveScience1, subjects were asked to watch a video and count how many passes occurred between basketball players wearing white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked across the court, but a majority of the subjects didn’t notice the gorilla at all. This gave evidence to cognitive forms of ‘blindness,’ or the inability to effectively multitask.
A study conducted by the National Library of Medicine2 proved a driver’s inability to both drive and talk on a cell phone. The researchers found that drivers using cell phones were at about the same risk of accidents as drunk drivers, missed more than half of the details on the road they would otherwise see, and were twice as likely to fail at noticing stop signs. But here’s scary news with all this multitasking: you and your prospective customers could be shrinking important structures in your brains while media multitasking. This is going to impact your selling success, whether you like it or not.
Research by neuroscientists3 has found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control. With these new findings, there is increasing concern about how simultaneous multiple media consumption is altering cognition, social-emotional well-being, and brain structure.
Media multitasking is also associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention. In addition, gray matter helps with muscle control, sensory input, decision making, and self-control.
There’s more: when you are multitasking and therefore losing gray matter in the brain, it affects the brain’s “executive functions.” These functions include:
  • Judgment
  • Analysis
  • Organizing
  • Problem solving
  • Planning
  • Creativity
With those “executive functions,” the mind codes memories into long-term knowledge. These functions, any of which your prospects need to use when making a purchase decision, are essential to your marketing success.
While there is reason for you, on a personal level, to be concerned about this development, if you’re a marketer, you have even more reason to be concerned about your prospective customers. Chances are they’re never going to be aware of the risks of losing gray matter. Moreover, many of your prospects will likely ignore it, thinking it will never happen to them.

MOVING DEEPER

People possess fear, uncertainty, and doubt, yet most people like to be uplifted with positive messages. People enjoy uniqueness, and love stories. People are intrigued with interpretation. Further, people desire to be given permission to affirm who they are, their beliefs, and their very existence. Those affirmations—the permission to act—are needed because of emotions.
As human beings, your mind is wired to absorb stimuli in specific ways, and over time, deep memory grooves are created. Your emotions have been formed over a lifetime of experiences, and the resulting personas that people possess belong in one, or a combination, of personality types.
Marketers have opportunities to tap into how the mind works and examine the deep human emotional memories that make each of us tick.
With continuing research, more is understood about how the brain functions than ever before.

THE BRAIN INITIATIVE

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is a research effort intended to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind. The goal is to uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. At first glance, it may seem this has nothing to do with marketing. But the opposite could be true.
Since the BRAIN Initiative was announced in April, 2013, dozens of technology firms, academic institutions, scientists and other key contributors to the field of neuroscience have made significant research commitments. In 2014, $100 million in commitments were announced, and now there is some $300 million in public and private investments4 already committed.
The momentum for funding the research comes from one disturbing statistic from the World Health Organization5 and with additional reporting of the economic impact of brain injuries, diseases and disorders in the Washington Post:6
One in four families worldwide includes someone with a brain injury, disease or disorder, including psychiatric illnesses and developmental disorders, according to the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. In the United States, the economic burden for neurological problems is nearly a half-trillion dollars every year.
The good news is that research is already in progress. The findings and treatment could have a profound influence on the health of people everywhere.
But the findings of these studies could also have an influence on how marketers approach marketing messaging. Studies are already revealing insights about how the brain processes information and makes decisions.
Three benefits of the BRAIN Initiative to marketers are:
  1. Economic Improvement. When one in four families is impacted with brain injuries or disease, their economical wherewithal or attention to engage with, and respond to our offers is likely diminished. If some of these families are helped, it stands to reason that the entire economy benefits.
  2. What Influences Thinking and Decisions. By understanding brain function, marketers can better understand the influences of how people think and make decisions. It can also deepen our ability to better imagine personas of our prospective customers.
  3. Focus Marketing Messaging. By unlocking mind mysteries, findings from research can help marketers focus marketing messaging that connects and resonates more deeply with people, and results in less wasted effort.
The opportunities for individuals, families, our culture and the world will most surely be better because this research promises a better future for us all.
Another outcome of this research is that as more is being learned about the brain, this information is an opportunity for marketers to be smarter. With so much new information and evidence, marketers have an opportunity to better know how the mind works, and use the mind’s pathways that can lead to more effective message comprehension to enhance consumer decision-making. Marketers that are uninformed of how memory grooves have been created over a lifetime likely create messages that are too shallow to tap into powerful emotional possibilities.
Contrast shallow messaging with deeper messaging that leads a persona to give oneself permission to act. Before the turn of the 21st century, there wasn’t a near-real-time, interactive forum for humans to respond publicly to stimuli. Today, with the Internet and social media in an “always-on” culture, you know when you’re liked, followed, shared, and affirmed. The confluence of technology, the Great Recession, and politics has driven us to emotional places that haven’t been experienced before in history.
A brief and very general, historical perspective spanning age groups of people who are alive today may help connect why deeper messaging is a requirement for real breakthrough.
As radio and television marketing media emerged, marketers and organizations could market to massive numbers of listeners and viewers in the 1920s on through the Great Depression in the 30s and World War II in the 40s. This impersonalized, one-way mass communication encouraged Americans to consume certain products and services by advertisers. Consumers couldn’t “talk back.”
Then Baby Boomers dominated the influence of American culture with the massive number of 70 million people born in the 1950s and 1960s. Mass media continued to dominate the landscape. But when the United States Postal Service introduced 5-digit ZIP codes in 1963, targeted selling through direct mail became a more viable and important marketing media option. Credit card availability fueled continued growth of direct mail later in the 1960s, as national credit card systems were created and put into place. The growth of direct mail advertising grew quickly in the 1970s, expanding decade after decade until the late 2000s. Today’s opportunity for direct mail is to seamlessly integrate information flow from the printed direct mail piece to online channels (an “o2o” offline to online channel leap).
By the 1980s, computers began to appear in offices, and extended into personal use, leading to expanded consumer demand. In the next decade, the personal computer became more widely found in households. By the 2000s, the Internet enabled consumers and businesses alike to communicate, conduct research, shop, compare, read or watch reviews and testimonials, ask friends for advice, and make purchase decisions differently.
Starting in the mid-2000s, social media was widely introduced, and ultimately became mainstream. This added another layer of liberation for consumers. At last, they could respond and have dialog, sharing their inner thoughts and emotions more publicly. About one-third of people get their news and see major headlines first on social media according to Pew Research7, as opposed to traditional mass media news channels such as television, radio, newspapers, or magazines.
Even with the multitude of media and channels, many marketers stubbornly hang on to past ways and continue selling as they have in the prior decades, missing the fact that an “always-on” cultural media landscape has changed. Sales messaging over the years have had human emotional components, but even at its best, the messaging often glossed over the deep emotional memory grooves that motivate us to act. Without a methodical process that identifies customer persona, stimulates emotion, calms the mind, positions/repositions, creates story, interprets, and affirms the individual with permission to buy, success can be elusive.
The expansion and accessibility of technology has created a nuanced change in how people interact with messaging, since it’s now more apparent how people respond. Marketers have to work harder because of the complex process of how your mind absorbs information and the messaging and communication required to get attention in a noisy, screaming world.
Why is the process more complex today than a decade ago?
The Great Recession that officially started in December of 2007 hit the economy and the psyche of consumers hard. Money was lost in the stock market. Home values plummeted. Spending contracted. Unemployment soared. The dollars consumers spent were more thoughtfully dispensed. Consumers could search for products and services online, read or watch video reviews, and then compare prices from the comfort of their own home.
In addition, politics became even more hardened with “us” versus “them” convictions where “we” and “compromise” have become dirty words. Many factors have increased fear, uncertainty, and doubt. A negative cloud lingers above people’s heads.
In a relatively short period of time, the game changed. Many marketers responded to new technologies by trying the latest and greatest marketing device or channel of the month. Other marketers stood on the sidelines, staying the course of what worked a decade ago, hoping that this change in consumer interaction with marketers would pass and revert back to the same way it was in the prior generation.
For many marketers, the basic approach to messaging remains rooted in the past. Some marketers don’t yet understand the human reasons, mind pathways and memory grooves of why people respond. Other marketers’ approaches haven’t evolved with the greater access to virtually every topic imaginable online. In this new century, people—consumers—are empowered. They are more skeptical because of marketer’s relentless, bombarding messages. In the attempt to shout louder, the consumer shut marketers out.
The human mind’s memory grooves are deeply paved with fear, hope, dreams, and desire for affirmations. But today, consumers are in greater control. They’ll call you out on social media and warn the world if they think you’re misleading them.
You need to understand and grasp how humans process emotions. Identify the persona. Stimulate, then calm. Position or reposition. Tell your story. Interpret. And set up the tipping point for people to act in your favor, once you move them to give themselves permission to respond. With this process, consumers will reward you with their business and praise, and ultimately can becom...

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