The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind Read Free

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CHAPTER 1
    $1 Trillion to Persuade
    the Brain
    Millions of people in our global econ-
    omy have jobs that depend on communicating with and persuading human brains. A trillion dollars is spent on this effort every year.
    Yet few of us understand how all those human brains really work—what is attractive to them, how they decide what they like and don’t like, or how they decide to buy or not buy the infinite variety of products and services presented for their consideration every day.
    This book is about how and why brains buy . It dips into a wellspring of new knowledge that has been pouring out of the neurosciences over the last few decades, especially the last five years, and describes actionable insights for businesspeople and marketers that can be derived from that knowledge and applied directly to the global industry of persuasion.
    These are remarkable times. It is a rare event when a science, its enabling technology, and a set of real, practical problems come together all at once to revolutionize and expand our capabilities in the world. It happened with chemistry in the eighteenth century, physics in the nineteenth century, mi-crobiology in the twentieth century, and now neuroscience in the twenty-first century. As Charlie Rose said in a recent series of interviews devoted to the neurosciences, “we have learned more about the brain in the last five years than in all human history combined.”
    I am lucky to be surrounded by the best neuroscience team in the world to help me understand these developments and I am going to share them with you in this book.
    What have we learned?
    The basic lesson is that human brains process much of their sensory input subconsciously. This is, of course, counterintuitive because we can’t think 3

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    The Buying Brain
    about how we think when we’re not aware of the thinking we’re thinking about! But the basic fact is undeniable and is validated by literally thousands of scientific studies. Most of the work our brains are doing day and night occurs below the threshold of our personal conscious awareness. Imagine all the work your brain was doing (that you weren’t aware of) just decoding the second sentence in this paragraph!
    Scientists have tried to express the ratio of subconscious to conscious brain activity in many ways. I like the formulation I first came across in Timothy Wilson’s book, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious .
    Our senses are taking in about 11 million bits of information every second. Most of that comes through our eyes, but all the other senses are contributing as well—hearing, touch, smell, taste, and spatial sensations. Our conscious brains—that part of thinking in which we are aware of thinking—can only process, at best, 40 bits of information per second. All the rest is processed subconsciously. That’s a ratio, if I’m doing my math correctly, of 99.999 percent subconscious to conscious processing. No wonder our brains often appear to be a mystery to us.
    The challenge for marketers and product developers is obvious. “How do I get into that 40 bits of consciously considered information?” That’s what this book is about.
    It is written for marketers and businesspeople. There are enough books about the brain that make me go “wow!” They are written by neuroscientists, social scientists, and psychologists. They create a sense of wonder for the brain and what it does.
    In this book I tackle the question that my Fortune 500 clients ask me, “Brain science is nice, but, so what ? Tell me how I use this knowledge. How do I change my brand strategy using neuromarketing? How do I change product design and pricing using neuromarketing? How do I analyze packages to make sure they will pop on the shelf? Are there