Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin
Book Review Rating – 4.5 Stars
What Is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing uses the latest research into neuroscience to gain a better, deeper understanding of how the human brain works and makes buying decisions.
With this book, “Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brain” the authors, Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin have written an extremely easy-to-read and thought-provoking book on how you can take advantage of the way the brain is structured to influence your potential customers to buy.
It’s often been said that “people make buying decisions emotionally and justify the decision rationally.”
That’s partly true.
According to this book it is not the emotional brain that makes the decision to buy but the old brain.
The old brain (sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain) takes into account input from the emotional brain and logical brain and then triggers the decision. It’s this part of our brain that makes the fight or flight decision when we’re in danger and you can get similar impulses in buying situations. Your old brain will guide you on whether to escape with a loud and firms No or stop around and hear more.
You Need Marketing To Speak To The Old Brain
Neuromarketing says that if your marketing is going to be successful, it must speak simply to the old brain.
This is a problem because the old brain is simple, it doesn’t understand words and it’s entirely selfish.
It is easily confused and its most natural first reaction if it feels any danger is to take flight.I’m sure you have experienced that feeling as a buyer when you know something isn’t right and you have to get away.
The Neuromarketing Steps To Tap Into The Old Brain
There is a four step process to talk directly to the old brain.
- Diagnose the pain
- Differentiate your claims
- Demonstrate the gain
- Deliver to the old brain
Pain – Claim – Gain – Old Brain – got that? I suspect the authors went to some trouble to help make the ideas rhyme.
The Six Stimuli That Speak To The Old Brain
Neuromarketing says that there are six specific stimuli that deliver messages to the old brain:
- Self centred
- Contrast
- Tangible input – keep things simple and easy to understand
- The beginning and the end
- Visual stimuli
- Emotion
The Neuromarketing book then goes on to explore in detail how you can achieve these ten factors – the fours step process and the six old brain stimuli and it also introduces seven impact boosters.
Neuromarketing Book Review Rating – 4.5 Stars
I rate this book as a 4.5 star book. This is a strong buy (or read) recommendation.
I particularly like the way it links and makes sense of factors from direct response marketing and the brand image marketing used by the big fancy advertising agencies who design advertising campaigns for the global brands.
While I have a preference for direct response – because you can see the results, it helps you see how images and pictures can be used to send a message directly to the old brain in ways that words can’t because people will often skip copy.
The book uses examples and stories to show you the power of Neuromarketing and how the individual factors work together.
I would have liked to have seen more proof and statistical evidence that some of the factors do make a difference.
This book is supposed to be based on scientific research so data should be available.
The book is a great introduction to this exciting new field of marketing. I suspect that many more books will appear on Neuromarketing that will go into issues in more detail. If you’re already familiar with this brain research in a marketing context, you might have concerns at how lightweight it is. For the rest of us, that helps make the contents more accessible because we’re not having to fight with our ability to understand.
Much of Neuromarketing has a familiar feel for anyone who has studied direct response marketing.
It helps to explain why something works better than something else. If you talk to prolific testers of marketing and you can be told that doing X increases response by 37% on average. The question of “why does it work” is never answered. Neuromarketing and the idea of sending a message to the old brain helps to provide the answers.
Anyone looking for radical new marketing techniques are likely to be disappointed but Neuromarketing reorganises the pieces to make a new pattern.
You can buy the book from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (affiliate links)
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Christophe Morin Explains Neuromarketing
I have two videos for you looking at Neuromarketing.
The first is only 2 minutes long.
The second is a much deeper look at the ideas but it takes 58 minutes.
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