Neuromarketing

Patrick Renvoise, Christophe Morin

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781418570309
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

The latest brain research is changing the way we think about sales. How can this help you increase your business?

With people being inundated with thousands of daily sales messages, selling is now tougher than ever. That's why you need to learn what neuroscience has uncovered that will immediately increase your selling and influencing effectiveness.

Unveiling the latest brain research and revolutionary marketing practices, authors Patrick Renvoisé and Christophe Morin teach highly effective techniques to help you deliver powerful, unique, and memorable presentations that will have a major, lasting impact on potential buyers.

In Neuromarketing, Renvoisé and Morin will help you learn:

• The six stimuli that always trigger a response
• The four steps to align content and delivery of your message
• The six message building blocks to address the "old brain"
• The seven powerful impact boosters to set your delivery apart from the rest

Once you know how the decision-making part of the brain works, you'll quickly begin to deliver more convincing sales presentations, close more deals, create more effective marketing strategies, and radically improve your ability to influence others.

1

THREE BRAINS, ONE DECISION-MAKER

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

~AMBROSE BIERCE, AUTHOR

Having the best technology or the highest quality solution does not guarantee that prospects will always buy from you. But exciting new findings in brain research suggest that speaking to the true decision-maker, the old brain, will raise your effectiveness in communicating an idea or selling a product.

You probably already know the distinction often made between the left brain and the right brain. The left hemisphere is the center of linear thinking such as language, logic, and mathematics. The right hemisphere is the center of conceptual thoughts such as art, music, creativity, and inspiration.

The brain can also be categorized into three distinct parts that act as separate organs with different cellular structures and different functions. Although these three parts of the brain communicate with each other and constantly try to influence each other, each one has a specialized function:

        •  The new brain thinks. It processes rational data.

        •  The middle brain feels. It processes emotions and gut feelings.

        •  The old brain decides. It takes into account the input from the other two brains, but the old brain is the actual trigger of decision.

The old brain is a primitive organ, a direct result of the basic evolutionary process. It is our “fight or flight” brain—our survival brain—and is also called the reptilian brain because it is still present in reptiles today. In fact, any animal with vertebrae has a spine within its vertebrae, and the top end of that spine is indeed the old brain. Some people call the old brain the “first brain,” as it appeared first—before we grew a middle brain and a new brain. Furthermore, while our brains grow in utero, the old brain is the first part of the brain to develop. Recent MRI studies on human development from birth to adulthood reveal that the new brain is not even finished until age twenty-four!

The old brain is well named, as it dates back to about 450 million years ago. According to leading neuroscientist Robert Ornstein in The Evolution of Consciousness, our old brain is concerned solely with our survival, as it has been for millions of years.

The body of research that demonstrates the prevalence of the old brain in the decision-making process is overwhelming. In the book How the Brain Works, human brain scientist Leslie Hart states, “Much evidence now indicates that the old brain is the main switch in determining what sensory input will go to the new brain, and what decisions will be accepted.”

Antonio Damasio, a behavioral neurologist professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and head of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, states in his book, Descartes’ Error, “Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of higher reason.” In other words, survival-related functions play a role in the decision-making process.

Michael Tomasello, a cognitive scientist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, writes, “The 6 million years that separate human beings from other great apes is a very short time evolutionarily, with modern humans and chimpanzees sharing 99 percent of their genetic material. . . . There simply has not been enough time for normal processes of biological evolution involving genetic variation and natural selection to have created one by one each of the cognitive skills necessary for modern humans to invent and maintain complex tool-use industries and technologies, complex forms of symbolic communication.”

Other works that highlight the role and importance of the old brain include You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard, by Bert Decker, who develops the concept of achieving trust via the old brain in order to generate understanding, and Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, who also reviews the working principals of the old brain. In Emotional Brain, Dr. Joseph LeDoux points out that the amygdala—located in the old brain—“has a greater influence on the cortex than the cortex has on the amygdala, allowing emotional arousal to dominate and control thinking.”

With all this scientific evidence, the challenge in sales and marketing becomes: how do you address a brain that is 450 million years old? Sales people, politicians, educators, and even parents can testify how hard it is to convince people by simply using words. Words have been around for “only” about 40,000 years. Before that, man’s communication was limited to a few grunts or gestures. It is even more difficult to try to influence your audience using written language. Why? Written words have only been around for about 10,000 years. That means the old brain is 45,000 times older than written words! There has not been enough time, in evolutionary terms, for written words to make an impact on our old brain.

So is it even possible to convince such a primitive organ using text?

To motivate and inspire our old brain, we must first learn to speak an entirely new language. This book is the only book to combine the latest brain research with cutting edge sales, marketing, and communication techniques.

WHAT TO REMEMBER

Researchers have demonstrated that human beings make decisions in an emotional manner and then justify them rationally. Furthermore, we now know that the final decision is actually triggered by the old brain, a brain that doesn’t even understand words.

2

THE ONLY SIX STIMULI THAT SPEAK TO THE OLD BRAIN

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

~WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, IRISH POET

So how do you systematically reach the true decision-maker, the old brain? The old brain, in addition to processing input directly from the new brain and the middle brain, responds only to six very specific stimuli, which, if mastered, give you the key to unlocking the decision-making process.

1. SELF-CENTERED

The old brain is responsive to anything pertaining to self. Why? It is completely self-centered. Think of the old brain as the center of “ME,” with no patience or empathy for anything that does not immediately concern its own well-being and survival. If you were to have the misfortune of seeing someone injured right in front of your eyes, your old brain wouldn’t really care: it couldn’t afford to. It would be too busy being relieved that you were not the one who was hurt. Emotionally, of course, you might empathize or, rationally, you may be concerned about the consequences of what just occurred, but these reactions occur at the middle or new brain level.

This stimulus example explains why 100 percent of your message as a seller should focus on your audience, not on you. If you take a critical look at your typical presentation, your Web site, or even your brochures, you will find that a lot of content relates to your business, your people, your history, your values, and your mission statement—none of which is of any particular interest to the survival brain of your audience. Your audience must hear what you can do for them before they will pay any kind of attention to you.

2. CONTRAST

The old brain is sensitive to clear contrast, such as before/after, risky/safe, with/without, or fast/slow. Contrast allows the old brain to make quick, risk-free decisions. Without it, the old brain enters into a state of confusion leading to a delayed decision or no decision at all.

Fundamentally, the old brain is wired to pay attention to disruptions or changes of state. It is hard not to notice when someone enters a room, when a cellular phone vibrates or when a light is turned on. These sorts of disruptions may signal important cues to what is going on in our environment, so they receive some priority in the way they are processed by our old brain. In fact, as much as we believe we are reactive to changes or disruptions, scientists have actually proven that our senses proactively scan our surroundings for such pattern interrupters.

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Increase your selling probability by triggering the only six stimuli that reach the true decision-maker.

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All of this means that you must create contrast to get your customers’ old brain’s attention. Using “neutral statements” such as “we are one of the leading providers of” is disastrous to your presentation. This type of language does not help your audience to quickly sort out information and trigger a decision.

3. TANGIBLE INPUT

Since the old brain is not qualified to process written language, the use of words—especially complicated ones—will slow down the decoding of your message and automatically place the burden of information processing onto the new brain. Your audience will want to “think” about making the decision more than they will want to “act” on that decision.

This is why the old brain needs tangible input: It is constantly scanning for what is familiar and friendly, concrete and immutable, and recognizable. The old brain cannot process concepts like “a flexible solution,” “an integrated approach,” or “scalable architecture” without a great deal of effort and skepticism. It appreciates simple, easy-to-grasp, concrete ideas like “more money,” “unbreakable,” and “24-hour turnaround time.”

4. THE BEGINNING AND THE END

Why do most of us remember the beginning and end of the movies we see and forget everything in the middle? The brain is constantly looking to conserve vital energy and will tend to drop information in the process. If the old brain can easily anchor a situation with a strong beginning point and a strong end point, it will not seek to use energy to retain content in the middle because it may not be necessary or vital to what the situation requires.

The old brain enjoys openings and finales and often overlooks what is in between. Such a short attention span has huge implications on how you as a seller should construct and deliver your messages. Placing the most important content at the beginning is a must, as is repeating it at the end. Anything in the middle of your message will be mostly overlooked.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that there may be something else affecting our level of attention for specific events: it is simply the degree to which those events trigger one of the greatest forms of pleasure to our brains—anticipation. Inde...