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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Brainfluence summary
Roger Dooley
100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing
15 mins
Table of Contents
Brainfluence
Summary of 6 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 6
Reduce the feeling of pain during the buying experience and even tightwads will buy.
We’ve all had the experience of buyer’s remorse, that feeling of regret after having made a purchase becomes. Sometimes it’s more than just a feeling – shopping can cause real pain.
Indeed, purchases themselves can activate the brain’s pain center. In a Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University experiment, subjects were presented with cash before being placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to record their brain activity. They were then offered items at a certain price – some items were offered at a bargain and others were a raw deal.
Interestingly, researchers could accurately predict whether or not the subject would buy an item or keep the cash just by looking at his or her brain scans and seeing how much pain they were feeling.
However, it’s not just the amount of money we part with that’s important for the brain’s pain center, but also the context. For instance, losing 75 cents to a vending machine can be far more aggravating than spending thousands on a car.
So if you want to sell to even the most miserly tightwads, you’ll need to minimize the pain they feel when they buy. But how?
Above all else, you should make the price seem like a bargain, or at least appear fair. If you’re selling a $120 annual membership to your gym, you can make this amount seem smaller by selling it for “only $10 per month” or “33 cents per day.”
Similarly, appealing to important needs over unnecessary pleasures is a particularly good strategy for selling to tightwads. For example, a Carnegie Mellon University study began by using a survey to situate participants along the “Tightwad-Spendthrift Scale” and then offered massages, both in terms of a massage for pleasure and also as a way to relieve back pain. The results showed that tightwads were 26 percent less likely than the spendthrifts to buy a massage for pleasure, but when the massage was described as relieving back pain, tightwads were only 9 percent less likely to buy it.
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What is Brainfluence about?
Brainfluence (2012) explores the unconscious thoughts and motivations that influence our decision-making process, and offers tips and tricks on how savvy marketers can exploit them. By understanding the mechanisms that cause us to buy (or not buy), you can increase your sales while keeping your customers happier.
Best quote from Brainfluence
Pricing and the product itself need to be optimized to minimize the pain of paying.
—Roger Dooley
Who should read Brainfluence?
- Marketers, managers and business owners, as well as those in the nonprofit sector
- People whose jobs depend on making sales
- Anyone interested in how to best get their message across
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