“We are not a thinking machine that feels, we are a feeling machine that thinks"

At the second edition of Star FLOW – The Change Festival, initiated by The Times of India, Patrick Renvoise, co-founder and chief persuasion officer, SalesBrain, took over the dais to talk about - Is there a buy button inside our brain? He opened by mentioning that he has dedicated 25 years of his life to find that buy button and the objective of his session was to convince that each of us has it.

“I am going to begin by saying that marketing doesn’t work. Why? We ask our consumers what do you want and based on their answers we build a strategy. The problem with this approach is that people don’t know what they want. So instead, about 20-25 years ago, we started to use a new brand of marketing called neuromarketing.”

He explains that in neuromarketing although we ask the customers what they want but we don’t trust their answers. Instead, we use six modalities - Facial analysis, voice analysis, biometrics, eye tracking, EEG, FMRI to find out what they really want.

In facial analysis, we measure the emotion of people based on how they contract the muscles on their faces. In voice analysis, we analyse the voice modulation of people to extract the emotions they are experiencing knowing that it is easy to lie in words but very difficult to do so with your tone of voice. We measure people’s skin conductance, heart rate and grieving rate in the third technique. In eye-tracking, we measure pupil conjunction.

Under EEG we measure small electrical currents on top of the skull of people and under the last technique we measure the amount of oxygen people burn in their head while they are thinking about a product and when they are trying to answer the question – what do you want.

“In 25 years of studying neuromarketing, we have learned that it's complicated because Homosapien is totally irrational.”

Today, when we study the brain of a consumer, we divide the brain into two systems: rational brain (not a decision-maker but a decision influencer) and primal brain (the decision-maker). The primal is fast but limited. Rational is slow but smart.

To trigger the buy button, the primal brain has only six stimuli: personal, contrastable, tangible, memorable, visual and emotional.

Speaking of human emotions, Renvoise says, “We are not a thinking machine that feels, we are a feeling machine that thinks once in a while.”

Going on to talk about the process of persuasion, he says there are four steps:

1. Diagnose the pain

2. Differentiate your claims

3. Demonstrate the gain

4. Deliver to the primary brain

Towards the end of the session, he also talks about the iceberg of decision drivers. It comprises of ‘like’ on the top and as we slip downwards it goes to ‘want’, ‘need’, ‘pain’, and lastly ‘fear’.