The Persuasion Code

How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime

Christophe Morin, Patrick Renvoise

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119440765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

ThePersuasion Code

Capture, convince, and close—scientifically Most of your attempts to persuade are doomed to fail because the brains of your audience automatically reject messages that disrupt their attention. This book makes the complex science of persuasion simple. Learn to develop better marketing and sales messages based on a scientific model; NeuroMap™. Regardless of your level of expertise in marketing, neuromarketing, neuroscience or psychology: The Persuasion Code: HowNeuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime will make your personal and business lives more successful by unveiling a credible and practical approach towards creating a breakthrough persuasion strategy.

This book will satisfy your interest in neuromarketing, scientific persuasion, sales, advertising effectiveness, website conversion, marketing strategy and sales presentations. It'll teach you the value of the award-winning persuasion model NeuroMap TM: the only model based on the science of how your customers use their brain to make any decision including a buying decision. You will appreciate why this scientific approach has helped hundreds of companies and thousands of executives achieve remarkable results.

• Written by the founders of SalesBrain who pioneered the field of neuromarketing
• SalesBrain has trained more than 100, 000 executives worldwide including over 15, 000 CEO
• Includes guidance for creating your own neuromarketing plan
• Advance your business or career by creating persuasive messages based on the working principle of the brain.

PART I
DECODING PERSUASION SCIENCE

CHAPTER 1
Why Is Neuromarketing a Game Changer?

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

– Stephen Hawking

This chapter will help you understand why anyone creating persuasive messages should consider using a neuromarketing model. First, we focus on the unique research questions answered by NeuroMap – specifically, an aspect not discussed in other books on the topic. Yes, it is easy to get lost under the hood of the neuromarketing engine with all its shiny bells and whistles. However, knowing the basics will help you quickly become a sharp and discriminant persuader!

In the following five chapters written by me, Dr. Christophe Morin, I bring a devouring passion for cracking the scientific code of persuasion. As you will quickly realize, I am somewhat of a brain nerd and therefore I have lots of information I am eager to share about this topic, while making this portion of the book both informative and enjoyable. I have delivered workshops on neuromarketing to thousands of people around the world for nearly 20 years. As an adjunct professor of media psychology at Fielding Graduate University, I collaborate with top academics to improve our understanding of media effectiveness in all its forms. Also, I have students from all over the world using the teachings of neuromarketing to improve movie scripts, ad campaigns, fundraising drives, and even to decode the neurobiological basis of terrorist propaganda.

Although the subject of brain‐based persuasion can be intimidating at first, what you learn about the brain in the next sections may influence your life beyond what you may have imagined when you picked this book. Personally, neuroscience helped me understand complex psychological disorders affecting some of my close family members; it influenced my parenting style and much more. Be assured that choosing to read through these next pages will not just improve your ability to persuade; it may also improve your life. Often, people walk up to me after a lecture and share how learning the basics of neuroscience made it much easier for them to understand why they have struggled (sometimes for decades) to influence or to understand loved ones. I have heard powerful stories that tell desperate attempts to convince a child not to smoke, compassionate efforts to ask a friend to quit drinking, or frustrating failures to close heated arguments. Let's be clear though; our goal is to discuss the effect of sales and advertising messages on people's brains. However, I believe the value of neuromarketing can be broadened to other aspects of life for which your ability to persuade others can bring relief and hope. In fact, Patrick Renvoisé addresses a broader application of neuromarketing in his popular TEDx talk (tinyurl.com/yb3x79vq).

WHAT NEUROMARKETING CAN TELL YOU OTHER METHODS CANNOT

Right from the beginning of the creation of SalesBrain in 2002, Patrick and I suggested that traditional marketing research falls short of its goals, especially when it comes to measuring the effect of advertising messages. Surveys, interviews, or focus groups do not explain the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying consumer behavior. Yet, the subconscious and preconscious functional circuits of the brain are essential to explain our responses to most marketing stimuli [4–8]. That is why neuroscientific methods can generate unique insights compared to traditional research methods – a fact that is now widely accepted by marketing and advertising researchers around the world [7, 9–11]. According to many scholars, the integration of neuroscientific methods in advertising research represents one of the most significant events in consumer research over the past 50 years [12].

Despite initial skepticism and resistance to change, the advertising industry has started to recognize the importance and relevance of this movement. Why? Because collectively, neuromarketing methods go far beyond traditional collection techniques by tracing the biological, physiological, and neurological changes that arise in our brains in response to marketing stimuli. These innovative experimental settings help us analyze instinctive, emotive, and cognitive responses without placing the burden of interpretation on research subjects. You may not realize this, but anytime you answer a survey, it requires an enormous amount of your precious brain energy. Getting paid to participate in surveys does not even reduce this burden! Cognitive energy is priceless. Using brain‐based methods means we no longer depend on the conscious and active participation of subjects. We are not asking them to behave like zombies but, simply, to relax and let the messages work on their brains. There is no need for the subjects to verbalize anything either. The point is to allow the exposure to a stimulus to work on their neurophysiology. Meanwhile, we maintain an environment that is safe, comfortable, and free of artifacts that could compromise the data, such as noise, moving objects, changing light, and temperature conditions.

What value do we get from these methods that traditional surveys and focus groups cannot provide? We get measures of consumer states that are difficult if not impossible for subjects to report consciously. Remember the last time you were asked what you thought of the most recent movie you saw? What a simple question, yet how difficult it would be to answer if you were forced to use emotional scales describing the degree to which it made you happy, sad, excited, nervous, worried, curious, and so on. The same is true of how we respond to advertising messages or even a website. We know these stimuli have some effect on us, but we cannot be trusted to rate with any precision their emotional and cognitive impact on our brain. Research has shown that when people are asked to describe their moods on a daily basis, they use more than three words on average to do so, suggesting that emotions are difficult to identify and report [13].

Let's go back to the key research questions that can be answered uniquely by neuromarketing research and NeuroMap. Neuromarketing research questions are designed to create insights that help you minimize the risk and uncertainty associated with the predictive effect of ads, websites, packaging labels, and more. To help you understand the relevance of these questions, it may help if you recall a campaign or a message you have recently created or used to influence someone. Think of the value of answering any of the following questions before you deployed your campaign.

There are six crucial research questions that can be answered by sound neuromarketing experiments and, of course, by NeuroMap.

Will My Message Grab the Brain's Subconscious Attention?

Attention recruits brain energy to allow your audience to focus on your message and process its content. A lot of that attention is managed below our level of awareness. Therefore, attention is difficult to measure when you ask your audience to describe how much they focused on your message. Consciousness, our ability to observe and report our immediate experience, is both slow and fragile. Your messages are narrative constructions that affect your audience at a much greater speed than consciousness allows. Consequently, we are incompetent at describing the quality of our immediate attention. Instead, collecting brain data is rather easy because it does not rely on a subject's ability to report. More importantly, it helps measure attention on a millisecond basis, which is a game changer for how you can explain the effect of any marketing stimulus. Stories produce various cycles of attention during which your audience is engaged, moved, or bored, the timeline of which can be captured by different neuromarketing techniques such as reading the conductivity of the skin, decoding facial expressions, tracking eye movements, or monitoring brain waves. A story works in amazing ways. Most of its effect is not accessible to our awareness. Neuromarketing methods are designed to show whether a message has captured any form of attention, conscious or subconscious, automatic or intentional, which makes an enormous difference in your ability to create successful messages.

Case Study #1: Which Animal Images Grab the Most Attention. A prominent nonprofit organization focusing on defending the rights of all animals wanted to find out why some of their ads work better than others to generate donations. They gave SalesBrain three ads that were produced in the past decade: one old and two new. The new ads were not doing better than the old ones, but they could not understand why. We used our NeuroLab to investigate the issue. By doing a complete assessment of the neurophysiological response from ...