What is the main message of Brainfluence?

The main message of Brainfluence is how to use neuroscience and psychology to influence people's behavior.

Who is the author of Brainfluence?

The author of Brainfluence is Roger Dooley.

Psychology

Brainfluence Book Summary - Brainfluence Book explained in key points

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Brainfluence summary

Name: Brainfluence
Rating: 4 (117 reviews)
Author: Roger Dooley

Roger Dooley

100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing

4 (117 ratings)

15 mins

Brief summary

Brainfluence by Roger Dooley explores the intersection of neuroscience and marketing, revealing how understanding the brain can lead to better persuasion, customer engagement, and ultimately, increased sales.

Topics

Growth Hacking Sales Neuromarketing

Table of Contents

Brainfluence
Summary of 6 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Learn some neuromarketing tips that can help you sell more.

What does it take for a business to have excellent sales? Easy: hire confident sales staff, train them in how to force your product onto the customer and you’ll be sure to sell tons. Right?

Well, it isn’t quite that simple. There are psychological mechanisms at work in the world of sales, and one of the keys to great sales performance can be found in the world of neuroscience. In recent years, scientists have discovered more and more about what makes us tick, and each bit of this valuable information can be used to sell things.

These blinks show you some of the best tips from neuroscience that you can use to sell more products.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why speaking into someone’s right ear is an effective sales strategy;
why your best sales technique might simply be to use a picture of a baby; and
why selling is all in how your product smells.

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.

Captivate all the senses, especially smell.

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.

Want to make your ad more effective? Put a baby on it.

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.

Generate more sales by building and rewarding the loyalty of customers.

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.

If you want to generate more sales, speak into the customer’s right ear when schmoozing.

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.

Sell more by surprising your customer’s brains.

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.

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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.

Brainfluence Review

Brainfluence (2011) by Roger Dooley is a fascinating book that explores the hidden ways in which our brains are influenced in decision-making and behaviors. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Provides insightful techniques backed by scientific research, enabling readers to understand and leverage the subconscious cues that influence human behavior.
Offers a wide range of practical examples and case studies from various industries, making the book relatable and applicable to different contexts.
Dooley's engaging and accessible writing style creates an enjoyable reading experience, ensuring the content is never boring and making complex concepts easy to grasp.

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

About the Author

Richard Dooley is an entrepreneur and marketer, and founder of the marketing consultancy Dooley Direct LLC. He is also the author of the blog Neuromarketing.

[Roger Dooley: Brainfluence] copyright [2011], John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.

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Psychology Marketing & Sales

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