Brainfluence summary

When making your sales pitch, it goes without saying that appealing only to your potential customers’ rationality is not enough – you also need to pull the right emotional strings. However, you’ll have even greater success if you appeal to a more visceral part of the human experience: this means you have to sell to all five senses.

Singapore Airlines is a good example of this principle in action. They’ve combined a number of sensory triggers as a means of developing their brand image. Their flight attendants, for instance, are impeccably dressed in uniforms that match the aircraft’s color scheme. They also all wear the same perfume, which is likewise used in their hot towels and other services.

People who have been in the ad business know that the right picture is worth a thousand words. But what kind of picture qualifies as the “right” image? Clearly some are more effective than others.

For starters, putting a face on your ad will attract attention. But a baby’s face will attract even more! This was demonstrated in a recent study, which observed high levels of activity in the participants’ medial orbitofrontal cortex, the area associated with emotion, just 150 milliseconds after having seen a photo of a baby.

Every businessperson’s dream is to spend less and sell more. One of the best ways to do this is to cultivate your customer relationships in a way that inspires loyalty. Not only are loyal customers cheaper to sell to, they’re also more likely to buy.

One way to boost loyalty is to draw people’s attention to other possible circumstances. In other words, drawing attention to disadvantageous alternatives to their current life – whether it’s the company they work for or a product they’re thinking of buying – actually increases people’s loyalty to their current situation.

The best marketing happens in person, as it allows you to engage multiple senses.

One weapon in your multisensory marketing arsenal is schmoozing. While some believe that it’s best to get right down to brass tacks, idle small talk can have a big payout too.

Why is it that children are so good at captivating our attention? Because they surprise us! They paint their faces blue, wear saucepans on their heads and hide in unexpected places. If you want to sell more, you’ll need to capture people’s attention in a similar way – not by hiding in unexpected places, but by showing customers unexpected things.

Researchers in the UK have discovered that the hippocampus, a small component in our brains, predicts what will happen next. It does this by automatically recalling a sequence of events in response to a single cue. And when the unexpected comes, we react.