The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (10 page)

In this chapter, we celebrated the spectacular beauty of the brain, a mas-terpiece of connected neurons, functional centers, and hemispheres. The one clear takeaway from all the facts, the electricity, symphony, and dance
: The
brain makes behavior.
Every millisecond of every day, the brain creates your world and the world of your consumers. It alone decides what’s important enough to pay attention to, to remember, and to act on. Only through your enhanced knowledge of the brain, and the enhanced messaging you create and deliver to it, can you reliably expect your brand, product, package, message, or experience to be granted an audience with this literal master of the universe.

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The Five Senses and the

Buying Brain

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r How each of the five senses “works”

r How to construct messages, products, experiences, and ideas that reach the brain through the five senses

r How the five senses interact with each other to construct our reality, day by day

r Relevant, new information about each of the five senses What a gorgeous, vivid, delicious, melodic, aromatic, sensual world we live in! The human brain is beautifully evolved to make the most of the sensory input available on the Blue Planet. It’s true that other animals have better senses. Your eyes can’t compare with a peregrine falcon’s “eagle eye” for sense of sight, nor is your nose a match for your dog’s exquisitely finely tuned sense of smell. Dolphins hear more than you ever will, and so do the felines and rodents in your house or neighborhood.

So why sing the praises of the five senses of the human brain? First, our sensory intake is remarkable because we have access to all of our senses. Many animals with expert sensory perception in one area developed that extreme sensitivity to counterbalance the absence of other senses. A mole, for example, has six times the touch receptors that we have, but he can’t see. The falcon doesn’t “touch” with anything other than his beak and claw, and our cats have no idea of the range of tastes we’re able to discern.

So if the first cause for sense celebration is that we are generalists, the second is that we’re voluptuaries. We revel in our senses, create art and music to celebrate them, and stand in awe of the beauty they bring. That, of course, is a self-perpetuating cycle: The more we revel, the more neural pathways we 41

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The Buying Brain

put down to enjoy, and the more and more delight we’re able to create and appreciate, so the more we revel, and so on.

Defining Consciousness

All of our knowledge and insight is gathered through our senses, and our emotions and feelings are expressed using them.

Our senses make sense of everything we encounter.

In the following sections are a top-down view of the five senses of humans, how they work, and what they mean to the buying brain.

Vision

The reason for our attention to the things we
see
is deep-seated and, of course, evolutionary.
About one-fourth of the human brain is involved in visual
processing,
much more real estate than is devoted to any other sense.

About 70 percent of the body’s sense receptors are in our eyes. To a large degree, we understand our world mainly by looking at it. The easiest and most successful way to capture the Buying Brain’s attention is through great visuals. We have evolved to put our visual senses at the top of our sensory hierarchies, and therefore, visual components tend to trump all others. When vision and sound are presented together, for example, the brain places greater credibility and impact on the visual portion. For example, that’s why the spoken portion of an animated spot with audio/visual synchrony out of sync will be discarded.

Interestingly, vision does not happen in the eyes, but in the brain.

The eyes gather light and enhance focus. But the brain makes sense of the colors, shapes, facial expressions, and landscapes it sees. That’s why we remember scenes in vivid detail months and years after they happen . . . why we “see” imaginary daydreams with ultra realism . . . why the dreams we have at night are vivid, full of detail, and often more “real” than reality itself.

The memory peak for visual impressions is in the age range of roughly 15 to 30 years. Researchers ask people in their seventies what memories they associate with a selection of words or pictures, and they report most memories P1: OTA/XYZ

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from when they were in that age range. One reason for this is that the years from 15 to 30 are very dynamic for most people—they move away from home, for instance, they get married for the first time, and develop their own identity preferences when it comes to such things as music and literature.

In addition, remember that color doesn’t occur in the world, but in the brain. Our brains “assign” the colors we see as the spectrum of light available to us bounces off objects around us. Not everyone sees the same colors; some of us are color-blind and others are color-gifted. Cézanne once wrote,

“The same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending more to the right or left.”

Bipedal Luxury

Our visual acuity became our core sensory attribute the minute we moved from four legs to two. Suddenly, we were further from the ground and the smells left by our prey, predators, and tribe. But, just as suddenly, we were able to scan the savannah around us, to track animals as they moved, and to visually project where they would be by the time we got to them. This same scanning, aiming, and projecting is evident every day, sometimes spectacularly.

For example, on the football fields and hockey rinks, when a quarterback throws a missile right into the waiting hands of an open receiver who appears, magically, just where the ball is thrown, or a player zooms a puck before the stick of a teammate who appears in the nick of time.

Our brain’s ability to scan an area, to locate an object in three dimensions, and to predict where that object
will be
over the course of seconds or minutes is hard-wired. So what? Keep this scanning and locating expertise in mind when laying out store designs and planograms. Be sure, for example, that
nothing
obscures your customer’s view of the object(s) s/he is scanning for. Overly tall shelves that obscure the landscapes behind them, signage with dense text and no visuals, and canyon-like narrow aisles all detract from this hard-won ability and frustrate the Buying Brain.

All primates, including humans, have well-developed vision using two eyes, called
binocular vision.
Visual signals pass from each eye along the million or so fibers of the optic nerve to the optic chiasm, where some nerve fibers cross over, so both sides of the brain receive signals from both eyes. Consequently, the left halves of both retinas project to the left visual cortex and the right halves P1: OTA/XYZ

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project to the right visual cortex. This means that things on the observer’s left go to the right hemisphere and things on the observer’s right go to the left hemisphere.

Predator Me

Look at yourself in the mirror. Gaze at your spouse eye-to-eye over your morning coffee, have a staring contest with your children. In each case, you’re looking into the eyes of a dangerous predator. Using eyes set directly on the fronts of their heads,
the eyes of humans are perfectly
positioned
to find and track prey. Front-focusing eyes also provide much better depth perception, a crucial element for keeping up with another animal’s movements. Human eyes have discrete mechanisms that gather light, focus on novel images, pinpoint them in space, follow them as they attempt to evade.

Prey (deer, squirrels), on the other hand, have eyes on the sides of their heads for excellent peripheral vision. Side-facing eyes gain advantages in field of view, but lose advantages in depth perception. This configuration is great at letting them know when something is sneaking up on them.

Not so great in helping them anticipate and “catch” something ahead of them, but then again, that is not their goal.

Mirror, Mirror

As an extremely visual species, it should come as no surprise that a person’s appearance, fair or unfair, has an effect on those s/he encounters. For instance:

Men prefer women whose pupils are dilated, as happens naturally during sexual arousal. Women during the Renaissance took small quantities of the deadly belladonna plant to make their pupils dilate. They also painted their skin white with arsenic to be more attractive to potential mates, giving a new meaning to making sacrifices in the name of beauty.

Attractive criminals receive shorter sentences.

Prettier babies are treated better than their peers are by care providers in nurseries.

Given the same resumes, people who are more attractive get the job.

Attractive children get higher grades overall, possibly because all of the positive feedback they’ve been given provides confidence.

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Vision in the Marketplace

The visual elements of your message or environment will have the most impact on your consumers.

r To avoid being lost in the clutter, emphasize clean, clear lines delivered at eye-level.

r Use the “
cathedral effect.
” When entering a cathedral, our eyes are drawn upward within the structure. For signage, outdoor and print ads, place the object of interest at the top of the ad.

r Use puzzles that are easily solved to draw in and delight the brain.

Smell

Our olfactory bulbs are, in fact, part of our limbic system, the deepest, most primitive part of our brains. They are separated by only two synapses from the amygdala, the seat of memory and emotion, and six synapses from the hippocampus, the brain organ responsible for storing memories. Carefully consider and create the scent that will be forever linked to your offering.

Never discount the power of smell. Remember the smell of Play-doh?

How about Listerine mouthwash? Now imagine them switched. End of story.

Think of it: Every other sensory system must follow a long and winding path to the brain, full of transfers and hand-offs. But
smells are mainlined
directly into our centers for emotion and memory.

Emotive and powerful, however, our olfactory senses are perhaps the least of all the weapons in our sensory arsenal. While 60 percent of our brain is devoted to sight, a scant 1 percent is devoted to smell. As the least necessary of our senses, Helen Keller called our sense of smell the “Fallen Angel.”

How Smell Works

When we inhale with every breath, we send particulates up through our nostrils, past the cilia that wave them along, and directly into the olfactory bulbs, which deliver them without further ado, into our brains. If we’re experiencing a familiar or highly evocative scent, the full memory of our first contact ignites both in our amygdala and hippocampus. For a friend, for example, stepping into a barn immediately transports her back to her days as a child, playing in her grandmother’s barn, with the warm, earthy scents of

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hay and horses, the buzz of the bugs, and the promise of lemonade all part of the picture. Another of my friends can eat a certain macaroon and find herself, for a few moments, back on the streets of Paris, the hot, sweet smells of pastry mixing with the metallic, slightly copperish smell of falling rain on cobblestone streets.

In evolutionary terms, it’s little surprise that
prey smells great to the
hunter
(steak, anyone?) and predator smells foul to the prey (if you ever get close enough to a large predatory cat, such as a lion, or even a large scavenger, like a hyena, you will be alarmed and possibly disgusted by their musk, their breath, or both). Our sense of smell was critical to our species’ survival. In its earliest uses, we relied on smell not only to find food, but also to find a healthy, genetically different mate and to identify our children in the dark. In the early days of medicine, smells allowed for the diagnosis of some diseases: Diabetes smelled like sugar, for instance, and measles like feathers. Trained dogs are our new partners in disease detection, able to sniff out melanoma, epileptic seizures, low blood sugar, and heart attacks. There is great interest in the medical field in developing new ways for dogs to sniff out disease in its earliest stages. By far, the best smellers are four-legged mammals. We have 5 million olfactory cells, while sheepdogs have 220 million.