Matt Lawless - Internet Marketing Consultant

Did you know that when someone makes a decision about something they could be using one of 3 different areas of their brain? No? Neither did I. But why should you care?

Why should you care whether your advertising speaks to the ‘Old Brain’, ‘Middle Brain’, or ‘New Brain’? For one reason alone… You can get a subconscious decision from a prospect before they even realise they are doing it! What would this do to your marketing campaign? What would the ability to tap into your clients’ brains, and get them to subconsciously decide to click on your ad, do for your business?

Now don’t get me wrong. This is not about tricking a prospect into clicking your ad. For one thing, that would be commercial suicide with a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign. Just imagine if hundreds of uninterested people clicked through to your site and then realised they had no interest in joining a stamp-collecting fraternity (i’m sure these exist). Not only would you be paying for every visitor, your conversion rate would plummet and so would your quality score.

No. This is about much more. And it is highly sophisticated.

Let’s take a trip into history, to the time when Mr. and Mrs. Ugg were spending all their time doing their best to avoid Ted the Tyrannosaurus. Back then, we (the human being) had only one fully developed type of brain - the ‘Old Brain’. This brain conditioned us to deal with the fight or flight decision which enabled us to stay alive. Pretty important back then!

Fast-forward about 68 million years, and it may surprise you to know that this part of the brain still exists. We still have that pre-programmed ‘Old Brain’ right at the front of our decision-making psyche. And the major benefit to playing to this part of the brain as an advertiser, is that the decision response time by the Old Brain is approximately 250-times quicker than a decision, one that is properly thought out, made by the New Brain.

For advertisers, this means that if you can reach directly into the Old Brain, your advert can be acted upon before your competitor’s has even been considered/comprehended.

As is discussed in Patrick Renvoisé’s Neuromarketing, the way to access the Old Brain’s decision-making process can be broken down into 3 key areas:

• Diagnosis of the Pain experienced by your client
• Differentiation of your Claim relative to your competitors
• Demonstration of the Gain your client will receive by choosing you

Anyone who can do this, in a way that speaks directly to the Old Brain, is onto a winning combination.

Diagnosing the Pain

The first step to successful marketing comes from understanding what it is that is motivating your prospective clients to need your product or solution. This is often referred to as empathising with your clients’ needs. Take time to consider why someone may need you, and I mean really understand their problem. Often, it would be sensible to prove this understanding by restating their problem as part of delivering you solution. Remember, no matter how good your solution may be, unless you can really demonstrate why they need it, you will typically get nowhere.

Differentiating your Claim

Unless you have recently discovered the secret to time-travel or some other similarly unique proposition, you will need to establish exactly why your service is better than your competitors. We all have competitors that are just dying to steal your customers, so you need to spell out exactly why your client would be crazy to go anywhere else. In terms of marketing to the Old Brain, this is best served with a picture that entirely focuses on the benefit you will bring to the table. Note: How many features something has, is the entirely wrong approach to marketing.

Incidentally, “Company xxx is one of the leading companies in the US” doesn’t cut it here. However, “Company xxx is the ONLY provider of xxx” is measurable and absolute by comparison, and should be the direction you focus on.

Demonstrating the Gain

This is probably the most powerful aspect of marketing: The “all these guys agree it works, therefore is WILL work for you” concept. The flip side to this, would be the feeling that something is “Too Good to be True”. We’ve all seen adverts that make up feel this way. The chances are that by validating your service through the use of multiple recommendations, your client will trust that the service is good for them too.

Remember the word TRUST, as this is your ultimate aim. If your client trusts you, they will buy from you (assuming you have successfully identified the need and stated specifically what makes you different). And assuming that you deliver what you have said, they will continue to buy from you again and again.

Remember, your Old Brain is simultaneously simple and complex at the same time: Simple in terms of only being able to process a decision that requires not much more than a simple yes/no answer (Q. “Do YOU need more money?” - A. Yes!); yet complex in that it can force an involuntary action from your body (to click on your ad) without any more detailed comprehension.

This topic obviously is much more detailed in scope than can be conveyed in this short post. If you are interested in reading further then order a copy of Neuromarketing and read it from cover to cover. I would suggest this is required reading for everybody who ever has to sell anything.

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