www.33voices.

com

THE BUYING BRAIN (Unplugged)

A conversation between A.K Pradeep & Moe Abdou
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

About A.K Pradeep & Moe Abdou

A.K Pradeep

Before founding NeuroFocus in 2006, Dr. Pradeep was the founder and
Managing Partner of Meridian Consulting, LLC, a privately-held California
company specializing in governance consulting and customizing and
applying GE best practices to multiple industry sectors. He is also the
founder of BoardVantage, a company formed in 2000 to provide web
based corporate governance platforms for corporate boards of directors.

Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things

that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

33voices.com 1
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

I have to tell you, when Steve called me and said I have a new book for you
to read and he sent me The Buying Brain, not only was I fascinated by the
title, but also everything that you put in there. I’m beginning to think this
is a whole new field that you’re creating.

I’m happy you think that way. If you think about it, throughout history, we
have all been buying various things. Sometimes we are conscious of buying
through the exchange of cash. Sometimes it’s an exchange of ideas. Sometimes
it’s an exchange of philosophies. Sometimes it’s just an exchange of happiness
and laughter.

You find that whether we like it or not, our brains are constantly in the
business of buying and selling throughout time, throughout every hour of
everyday. Isn’t it interesting and nice to kind of take a step back and to look to
see if buying and selling or persuading and being convinced are such an integral
part of human existence. How can the overt mechanisms of business give us a
clue to the underlying mechanisms that form every other facet of life?

Obviously, without question Dr. Pradeep, you have really created

something that will change the paradigm of business and marketing but I
think most of us have yet to hear the term, neuromarketing. Why don’t you
start by just clarifying just what that term means in a general context so
our listeners will have an opportunity to know the proper definition as we
move forward.

Absolutely, thank you very much Moe. That’s a very good question, what is
neuromarketing? Today, marketing is focused on what people do. A little later,
marketing gets it’s inspiration from what people say. A little later, marketing
gets its inspiration for what people look at. But, neuromarketing is getting
marketing to be inspired by how people think and feel.

So really, if marketing was driven not just what people do, not just by what
people say, not just by what people look at, but being inspired by what people
feel and think. That is the world of neuromarketing; using our neurological
responses as a prime driver and input into marketing and therefore, the output
of a measurement of marketing effectiveness. So, utilizing our inner feelings,
our thoughts as a guide to help us market better, to sell better, to service
better, and even to design better.

I say that using the brain as the primary source of inspiration to perform all
marketing and using the brain as a primary source of measurement of
marketing effectiveness becomes a very clear scientific way to understand how

33voices.com 2
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

to do any of these things better. Be it to market better or to measure the

results of marketing better. That is the world of neuromarketing.

But there is a twin sister to that and I would like to, if you don’t mind, talk
about the twin sister to neuromarketing. I called it neurodesign. Because so
far, our designs, be it the design of your cellphone, of your TV, of the remote
in your house, of the blender, of the automobile, have a lot been based on
what people said they wanted. Design was based on what people did and said.
Design used to be based on what people looked at.

Today, we are having designs based on how people think and feel -
neurodesign. The best example of neurodesign I would say is your little flip
camcorder or your video recorder. It has one big button in it. And just in case
you would miss it, the button is also red. The iPod’s user interface is a classic
example of neurodesign. Understanding how the brain likes to see design and
designing things in a way that truly engage the human brain.

So be it marketing, designing marketing, to design it in a way to engage the

human brain or having product designs that engage the human brain. Neuro, is
the operative word. Instead of hearing people, instead of seeing what they do,
instead of looking at their eyes, we merely listen to the whispers of their
brains.

That’s what makes it so fascinating. When I read the foreword by my good

friend David Meerman Scott, I got the basic premise of the book
immediately that was reinforced throughout the book which I guess from
my perspective was, that our brains’ process is done through our
subconscious mind. I guess my question to you is, I kind of knew that but do
we know why that is?

It’s very simple. I’ll give you two examples. The amount of conscious thinking
that we do consumes a ton of energy, a ton of attention, conscious attention.
Almost everything that we talk about can go back to two very simple primary
rules the brain is almost programmed to obey.

Number one, rule number one, the brain consumes the maximum amount of
energy in the body, 20% to 25% of the bodies energy is being consumed by the
brain. Therefore, anything that a brain does, it tries to minimize and optimize
energy consumption. That’s rule number one.

Because we didn’t have in the old days in the jungle, there was not a Starbucks
down the corner to get some more coffee. We evolved in a manner to conserve

33voices.com 3
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

energy and because the brain is the biggest consumer of the body’s energy the
brain always tried to optimize and minimize energy consumption.

Rule number two, we constantly look out for survival. It is one of the primary
functions especially when we walked down and we came down from the trees
and we started walking upright, survival became a very key function of what
the brain does.

So now you put these two rules together and you ask yourself the question,
what part of whatever I’m watching or experiencing, I literally would like to
make it be processed as much as possible by my subconscious that the amount
of information underneath the conscious level that I have access to is vast.

So it becomes a very easy processing of information without my having to

consciously and energetically remember a lot of things and process a lot of
things. Processing in the subconscious minimizes energy consumption. It also
freezes up my conscious to deal with any survival issues that may arise.

So if you look at rule number one and rule number two, it suddenly becomes
clear why a lot of what we process goes underneath the surface. In fact,
underneath the surface of our conscious thinking we truly have access to tons
of data that may otherwise overwhelm our conscious thinking processes if
brought into the forefront. So it is efficacious to process it underneath. It’s
also from a very energy standpoint, it is very efficient to process it underneath,
it also freeze up my conscious mind to deal with survival issues.

I would clearly request you to think about you computer desktop. Do you know
how many things your computer is doing while you are perhaps changing the
color of one PowerPoint chart into another? Your computer is doing so many
things. The funny thing is, if everything that your computer was doing was
made accessible to you and obvious to you on your desktop in front of you, you
would say, “My God, I can’t deal with this. There is so much stuff going on.”

So your desktop is relatively clean but the fact that your desktop is clean does
not mean your computer is sitting idle. It’s actually doing a ton of work. That’s
exactly how things happen with the human brain. You could look at your
computer desktop as a little metaphor, a very tiny metaphor for something
that is infinitely more complex for just our own human brain.

So then, when you look at that notion, and you talk about how much
energy and you reference in the book the term 20%. So this whole notion of
ease of processing is a critical advertising component that I would think
would lead more towards the importance of having simplicity, of having

33voices.com 4
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

things that are visually attractive when it comes to advertising. Is that

kind of where this thing would go from an advertising component
standpoint?

Absolutely. What is fascinating is we call it the fluency of cognitive processing.

Simply put, how easy is it to understand something.

Now you go to the Google page and you’re struck by that little simple box
there, nothing else to occupy your attention. You look at an iPhone or an iPod
and you’re struck by the interface out there, something very simple.

I just want to clarify. We like things to be simple but not simplistic. There is a
big difference here. The brain, while looking for things that are simple and
easy to process, is also tickled by novelty. It’s tickled by a simple puzzle. So
what you quickly find is there is a very fine line of trying to make things simple
but not making them simplistic that it is boring.

You find that the brain wants the easiness of being able to process something
but also craves the excitement of something new and novel. That is exactly
why you have wonderful creative minds that are trying to do advertising. That’s
speaks to these two apparently contradictory aspects. The fact that it must be
simple must also be balanced by the fact it must be novel and interesting. I
would say that these are not, I repeat, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact,
they should be twin sisters that walk hand in hand.

I knew I was going to jump around because this stuff fascinates me but I
want to talk about this whole issue of novelty. You give great examples
with the iPhone and you give great examples with some of the references
that you have in the book. If we tend to get very excited about novelty as
consumers, so from a marketing perspective, how would you recommend
that someone use novel and persuasive advertising if they were promoting
a service say like consulting? Because the more we see out there from a
marketing perspective, the more we see a lot of similar messages.

Absolutely. Meaning when you look at the service business and you look to see
what is novelty in a service business? It is so easy to talk about products and
features. You’d say to yourself, if I’m a bank; if I’m a mortgage provider; if I’m
in the consulting business; if I’m a doctor, what does novelty mean to me?
What you quickly find is the same way one looks for novelty in the product
business, one looks for novelty in the service business.

Let’s take a simple example. Take Southwest Airlines as an example of a

service. They fly planes like everybody else. They take people from location

33voices.com 5
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

one to location two like everybody else. They charge money like everybody
else. One could argue they’re providing what could be considered a garden
variety service. There can’t be anything novel there. But if you look at the
history of Southwest Airlines, they pioneered novelty in so many aspects of the
consumer experience. So we call it the total consumer experience.

That is true not only for products, but it is also true for services. If you look at
the totality of the consumer experience, and you ask yourself, what are the
ways in which the consumer experiences something that could be presented to
them perhaps differently? We always say that the aspects of novelty, the
attention getters are emotion, newness, error, ambiguity, and all of those
things.

So you quickly find that if you look at Southwest as an example, they made
some very interesting changes. They said, well, we are going to abolish the
notion of first class seats. At least early on, they did. And then they said, our
flight attendants are going to not assume a posture of a very serious service
provider. They’re actually gong to adopt the posture of a very, very funny,
happy, next-door Joe or Jill when they work with you.

By the way, our novelty is not that they’re going to give you exotic foods on
the plane actually, it’s the other way. We’re going to give you something that
you will always joke around, they’ll give you peanuts for the money.

So what’s fascinating, they took what could be considered a standard boring

business model, found aspects of that they could flip over entirely and truly
make it a differentiated novel experience for the consumer. This is in the
airline transportation business.

Now, I was talking to a very senior person in the financial services industry who
told me, “Pradeep, financial services seems to be pretty much straight and
direct. You want it to be as cut and dry as possible with no room for creative,
innovative, novel things.” I said to him, there is something we talk about in the
world of products.

When we do a total consumer experience, we look for what we call the

neurological iconic signatures of an experience. Simply put, our brain
summarizes. If it’s a bag of chips at the moment I mention the delicious crunch
of the chip in your mouth, it becomes a very simple summary for the entire
experience.

If I talk about the salsa dripping from the chip down to the bowl as you take it
to put it in your mouth, suddenly that just image of luscious tomato juice

33voices.com 6
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

dripping down the ridges of a chip, are enough to conjure the entire
excitement and experience for you.

So I asked my friend, what is the iconic signature of a financial services

experience for the consumer, the way we have iconic signatures for products?
Why can you not have iconic signatures for service? He said, “Well, my God, I
haven’t quite thought about it that way. I’m not entirely sure there is even an
iconic signature for a financial services experience. What could it be?”

So I told him, “It’s something for you to think about and consider.” I don’t care
how wealthy you are, when you insert your ATM card into an ATM machine, and
you punch your code and you put the amount of dollars you want, there is a
moment of anxiety. Then you wait to see whether you hear the delicious sound
of the dollar bells popping in the dispenser at the bottom. It’s a very
interesting sound, of those dollar bills popping in the dispenser. Do you know
what I’m talking about Moe?

Absolutely.

It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, you go to the moment of anxiety hoping
there is enough cash for you to get it out there. It’s a very gratifying satisfying
sound.

Now I asked my client, I said, “Where have you used that sound in your
industry? Where is it coming out?” Be it your website, or be it your service
centers or your call centers or any kind of an experience. Where have you
created for me that moment of comfort knowing that cash is there right where
I want it?

So you quickly look around and you find that even in the world of service
experiences. There are wonderful ways to look at novelty and they come by
looking at what I call the total consumer experience. You’ll get a total
consumer experience, look at all the points in there and look to see where can
you create novelty or newness for the consumer in their interactions, in their
touch points with that service. You then add to it perhaps an iconic signature
or two that is reminiscent, that is evocative and there is a wonderful summary
of that experience.

I didn’t tell you this but I’ve spent over 20 plus years in the financial
service world. Innovation is not a word that is used in boardrooms at all.
This is foreign. They probably don’t know what the novelty is or they try
to stay away from it because it has to be black and white.

33voices.com 7
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

It’s interesting. We do something fascinating in the world of innovation be it

for service companies or for product companies. We take a concept for a
product or a service and we convert it almost into a radio ad. Then what we
do, we actually have consumers listen to that concept of a product or a
service. As they are listening to it, we measure their brain’s reactions at 2000
times a second. So literally, every concept is rated overall for the overall
consumer’s reaction.

But more importantly, as the consumer hears various features or price points of
value proposition of that particular product concept or service concept, we
look at their brain reactions. So we are automatically able to not only rank an
overall concept, we are also able to rank the features of the price points of the
value propositions embodied in that concept.

This way, especially in a complex service like financial services, it’s very hard
for a consumer to articulate through a survey or a focus group, what are the
unique features they liked and they did not like? Because by the time they are
done thinking about it, they’re no longer sure.

So grabbing a consumer’s reactions as they hear various things without even

having them go through the exercise of having to articulate it, is a very
powerful way of driving innovation in what I would call very traditional fields
such as financial services or such as management consulting.

You know, you raise some really important points. One of the things that
just popped into my mind, as consumers, we tend not to trust advertisers,
is that true?

Anytime somebody comes to you and they say to you, I am here to persuade
you, you’re human reaction as a human being is to say, “Wait a minute, I don’t
want to be persuaded.” Because you’re coming in announcing to me that you
are trying to persuade me, my trust in you is a little different than if you
walked in with a completely different attitude that you are here to inform me
or to entertain me.

These are implicit principles that have formed the basis of advertising for so
long. I don’t fault companies for trying to persuade. I don’t fault consumers for
actually saying, “I don’t want to be persuaded. I don’t want to be convinced.”

But a fact of life is this, when your little child asks you for pocket money, or
your teenage daughter says, she needs to go out on a Saturday night, everyone
is trying to either persuade or to be persuaded. This is a fact of life. This is
what happens everywhere.

33voices.com 8
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

So what you quickly find is -- I find that advertisers and consumers are in a
wonderful relationship which is no different than that of family members with
each other; than of your boss with you. Than of the student writing a
wonderful essay hoping to persuade the teacher into giving him or her a good
grade. So persuasion and convincing is such a part of human existence that I
don’t think advertisers are uniquely viewed in one way, shape or form or the
other. It is just a part of human life.

Part of the reason now that I enjoyed writing The Buying Brain was, the same
battle that an advertiser goes through in trying to persuade a consumer of the
goodness of their product, of your service, is exactly the battle of a chemistry
teacher goes through into trying to convince the class of the fun of chemistry,
of biology, of science, of history, of geography. Teachers go through the exact
same problems.

I would say that I would hope that our teachers profit a lot more from this book
than perhaps than advertisers do because the future of the next generation
truly depends on their abilities to persuade the children to learn well.

If you look at it, the lessons we have learned from advertising and marketing, I
think have such profound use in human dynamics and human relationships
because at the end of the day, we all try to market to each other. We all try to
persuade each other. I think some battles of persuasion or shall I say, a little
more important than others.

So as parents try to talk to children and as teachers try to talk to students and
as counselors try to talk to those that seek help, I think the lessons of
persuasion and the importance of such lessons and understanding what truly
persuades the human brain is a lot more relevant than in the world of
advertising or marketing or messaging.

When we look at neuroscience from within the context of selling, selling

anything, there is still a lack of connection between a sales person and a
buyer. It’s still perceived that I’m trying to sell you something and the
buyer is saying, “I don’t want to be sold”. How important is language and
using the right terminology to try to instantly eliminate that tension or
eliminate that barrier? When I say I’m not here to sell you something, red
flags pop up. But perhaps, as you mentioned, I’m here to inform and
entertain you or I’m here to have a conversation with you. How important
is the language to try to maybe eliminate that tension a little bit?

I think you’ve touched on something that is extremely important. In fact, if you

ask yourself, where do the battles of buying and selling truly come up? You

33voices.com 9
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

quickly find that they come up in a retail environment because you have gone
there with the explicit desire or perhaps a willingness to buy. The sales person
and the products are there on the shelf with the explicit intention of trying to
sell you.

So the environment in a retail store is the ultimate battleground where this

transaction happens. If you look at my book, The Buying Brain, in fact, I
describe in a chapter that I call Buying Brain in the Aisle, when I talk of the
shopper experience framework. I find that the shopper experience framework
becomes a wonderful way for both buyers and sellers to interact that
eliminates the tension.

If you take a step back and you say, what is the framework? It’s got basically
seven dimensions. The first one is information. I’m here to inform you. The
second one is basically the environment in which the shopper or the buyer and
the manufacturer or advertiser presents themselves. Different environments
stimulate different kinds of behavior.

The next one is entertainment. If you go to a store and you find that you are
entertained not necessarily sold to, the way you interact is entirely different.
So it’s information. It is environment. It is entertainment.

The next one is education. We go there not only to be informed and

entertained but I would like to be educated about something that I didn’t know
about. So I walk away from my retail experience with a sense of knowing more
than what I came in with.

The next one, the fifth one is simplicity. Again, if you go to high end retail
stores, you very quickly find that they try to create an environment of almost
Zen-like simplicity. That actually has an unbelievable impact on how the
consumer feels about the entire place.

So it’s information, environment, entertainment, education, simplicity and

then next one, very, very important is self worth. This is very, very important
that how does a shopper in a store walk away with a sense of self worth and
feeling good about themselves?

This is where, if you walked into, again, an industry that really hasn’t captured
the essence of this, is the automotive retailing industry. They have ways to go.
Because when you walk into a showroom, you are almost sure you will walk out
of that showroom not feeling good about yourself thinking you probably got a
deal that you could have done better at.

33voices.com 10
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

An entire industry has been created, unfortunately, with denying people self
worth. So you quickly find that any time you have a retail experience that you
can walk away with self worth and feeling good about yourself. It’s a fantastic
experience. So it’s information, environment, entertainment, education,
simplicity, and self worth.

The last one that has become very big of late is community. And by
community, I don’t necessarily mean the community of people in a certain
geography that you belong to. It could be a larger community of people that
are united through a purpose. Purposes unite people and form larger geography
agnostic communities the electronic communities such as a social network or a
Facebook becomes very, very important and very, very critical.

So you quickly find that, if you look at the seven dimensions of what
constitutes a superior experience vis-à-vis information, environment,
entertainment, education, simplicity, self-worth and community, you quickly
find that it has nothing to do with overt selling and overt buying. It has
everything to do with creating an experience that is most conducive to a
transaction without explicitly issuing a call to action.

That is absolutely brilliant. One of the notions you talk about is the
glaring difference between the male and the female brain. From an
advertisers perspective, if there were one or two things that they can
focus on about that distinction that would make a difference and how they
advertise to each of the different sexes, what would they be?

Let me tell you one thing. If you just remember two things, the big difference
between women and men’s brains. For women, social interaction is critical.
Social connectivity and interaction fires meta neurons systems in a woman’s
brain much more intensely than it does in a man’s brain. So anytime, you
showcase product consumption or service enjoyment in a manner that creates
social interactions, it is extremely critical for the female brain, number one.

I just want to give you one more thing to think about for a female brain and
that is the choices and nuancing of words is very critical for the female brain,
infinitely more so than a male brain. So the choice of words and the emotional
nuancing of words can make a fundamental difference for the female brain.

If you say, here are two things that I want pay attention to, number one, is the
social interaction especially in the act of product consumption or service
enjoyment because it fires the metaneuron system.

33voices.com 11
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

Number two, because of the hemispherical connectivity in a woman’s brain,

the emotional nuancing of words is very important and very critical. If there is
one more thing, just one more thing that you can do, please never ever stress
out a female brain by saying this sale will end in the next few hours. This will
end in X minutes or whatever. That stressful time element is a total turnoff for
the female brain. So if you have to remember just these three principles, you’ll
find that a lot of advertising today is fundamentally altered.

One of the things that you talk about when discussing the female brain and
you give some examples of how to deal with it. One of the things that
really intrigued me there is your point about telling stories not pitching a
product. I know stories are very, very effective, but are you saying
particularly for women, if an entrepreneur or a business is trying to
market to women, that this is a strategy that will be more effective than
pitching a product then maybe you can give us an example of that.

Well, it’s like this. Again, if you go back to the foundational principles, we find
that women look for context to interpret anything a lot more than men do. The
context becomes very relevant. Because context become relevant, the
attributes of a product or a service do not by themselves, stand in isolation but
they require a context or an environment for them to belong in.

So a story becomes a very wonderful way of providing a context; a context in

which somebody can relate to something. It has a past, it has a present, and it
has a way in which things have evolved. And a story can also carry with it a
level of emotional appeal that pure facts by themselves may not reveal.

So you will very quickly find that when you market to women, creating the
context becomes crucial because she interprets facts not in isolation but in a
context. Creating a story provides a natural context but also with the story,
comes something that appeals to her brain that is a certain emphatic and
emotional view of facts.

So by putting it all together and presenting it in a time evolution sequence, you

are able to truly talk to a woman’s brain in a way in which she wants to be
spoken to. That is why you quickly find not that women do not appreciate facts
or numbers, they do as well as anybody does. But their brains tend to
appreciate this even better when there is context to it. And when there is an
emotional context to it, it drives it even further.

So that is why I think the simple principle has applicability not just in
advertising but if you look at the way we present math problems to girls and

33voices.com 12
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

math problems to boys, they are both manipulation of numbers. We could

criticize men or women for doing well in this or doing well in that.

I have to come to believe that the way we present quantitative information to

women perhaps must cater better to how their brains are used to perceiving
and receiving it rather than it be done for everybody else. My constant refrain
to all my clients has been most of advertising and marketing today,
unfortunately, is created by guys for guys. The funny thing is, most of the
primary shoppers are women and there in lies the huge disconnect.

Very interesting. I want to be conscious of your time so I have just a couple

more questions. We can’t ignore the baby boomer generation. You spend a
lot of time in the book discussing it. They control a great majority of the
assets in the world. You talk about the key success in dealing with baby
boomers is to focus more on accentuating the positives and not to talk
about doom and gloom. Is it because they’ve reached a stage in their life
where they don’t want to hear it anymore because even the younger
generation doesn’t want to hear that.

I think the younger generation is aging faster I would think. I think you touched
on it and you basically got the answer. When we all grow up in life, at some
point in time, you quickly find that all kinds of horrible things have happened
to us. Despite all the horrible things happening to us, we’re still here. We’re
still here and we will continue to be here.

You quickly find that it is not that their brains do not respond to what I call the
negative information but it is automatically, discounted. It is discounted
because in some deep way, we all know despite all the horrible things that
happen to us, we are still here. The emotional value and the value that a
particular negative attribute contributes to a decision starts to diminish.

So you’re more working on what is the positive things that can be achieved and
your brain has learned over a course of time because it has still survived after
all that have happened to all of us, it has learned to discount the value or the
contributive effects of negative information to a decision.

That is why we say that as you talk to people in the boomer group and
accentuate and emphasize the positive. Please, do not mention the negative
too many times because a strange phenomenon happens after awhile, the
negative parts of whatever the message is starts to get ignored, really get
ignored.

33voices.com 13
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

There are two lessons to be kept in mind when you work with a boomer
population. One of course is what you point out which is to accentuate the
positive. The political advertising that you do, marketing messaging that you
do, financial services messaging that you do, whatever it is, accentuate the
positive and the possibilities - number one.

Number two, make it clutter free because one of the important neural
mechanisms that starts to degrade as we cross 60 years of age is you quickly
find that our ability to suppress distractions has gone down. Because their
ability to suppress distractions has gone down, you’re still focusing, still paying
the attention. But our ability to suppress distractions has just diminished as we
cross the 60 barrier.

So therefore, be it bank statements that you present to the over 60 audience,

be it product features you talk about, be it websites you talk about, be it user
interfaces you talk about, be it nutritional value you talk about, be it
subscription information you talk about, remember, if there are distractions,
you have just hurt yourself. Don’t do that. Those are the two primary lessons.
If any, I want people to take away from kind of the boomer chapter in the
book.

There is one last thing I want to talk with you about. By the way, you give
a fabulous example in the book about your consumer company that you
helped to reinvent their website. It’s a fabulous opportunity for people to
see the differences in the work that you’re doing specifically with these
big companies. But I want to talk about the digital world. I want to get
your perspective on a couple of things.

We’re inundated with websites. When you’re thinking about a website it

doesn’t matter what it is, you talk about Google’s box. How would you
organize information or how would you recommend people think about
organizing information on websites?

I would urge you to go look at the website we created for The Buying Brain
(www.BuyingBrain.com).

If you look there, we try to incorporate a lot of our best practices into the
website. I wanted for the website to serve two purposes. One, to not only talk
about what the book is and what it can do etcetera but to be illustrative of
lessons that we have learned.

Let me layout for you a whole bunch of best practices for anybody in the
business of building websites or digital interactive content or even user

33voices.com 14
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

interfaces. Be it not just websites but your cellphone user interface or

software user interface.

Number one, we say, have no more than three image groups. Three to five
image groups is the maximum. Think of an image group as a bunch of grapes.
You never want to have more than three to five image groups.

If you look at the Buying Brain website, you’ll first of all see a logo on top that
is one image group. You’ll see a big image there that changes to the second
image group. You will see the words and the book together, third image group
and that’s it. No more. So three to five image groups is number one that you
want to make sure happens.

Number two, you find that even when you have imagery, the imagery must
have a level of novelty, must have a level of motion, could have a level of
ambiguity, and error. The order I say is motion, novelty, error and ambiguity.

Anytime it’s present, the brain absolutely loves it and wants to get more of it.
So if you look at even the choice of imagery, we try to make sure on the
website that we choose images that have a level of novelty or error associated
with them. The first image that you would almost see is a dog wearing glasses.
You would say, “Wow, that’s erroneous. I don’t see a dog wearing glasses that
often.” It’s as simple as that.

Then the other important rule is this. Whenever you show faces that the brain
pays attention in this hierarchy, first you look at eyes then you look at lips and
fangs, and then you look at the overall face then you look at hands. It’s the
hierarchy in which the brain looks at it. Why does it look at it that way? Go
back to rule number two, survival.

When I look at your eyes, I immediately get a view as to what you’re trying to
do. Are you going to hurt me? When I look at your mouth and your fangs, I look
to see, are you going to hurt me? When you look at your face, I wonder, are
you going to hurt me? When I look at your fists, I wonder, are you going to hurt
me. Even in showcasing human imagery, that’s an order in which the brain
processes it.

Then you would see how the book, The Buying Brain, cuts into the
“background” and the image. What’s fascinating is this, you again, very quickly
find when the background cuts into the foreground, the brain flags it as novelty
or error and immediately is interested. It wants to know what it is; very, very
simple rule. And then again on the website you would see that the entire thing

33voices.com 15
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

looks like a device - a website that doesn’t look like a website but looks more
like a device. It’s a fascinating thing.

In the financial services industry, how many clients I’ve spoken and I have told
them a device that all your consumers know how to use in an ATM. By golly,
around the world, everybody has figured that out. Could you give me a reason
mister on this financial services provider why your website would not look like
an ATM? Not a single person can give you the answer to this question.

What’s fascinating is when a website looks like a device, the brain again is
stunned by novelty of it and the error, “Wait a minute, this is supposed to be
your website. It looks like a device.” In fact if you go to The Buying Brain
website and you will see that a device that is present there is kind of one of
the most famous devices in the marketplace. You know what I’m talking about,
right, Moe?

I don’t have the website up right now but I’ve been there.

If you look at the website, it has a wonderful look and feel that almost feels
like your operating an iPad, everything including the buttons. So the funny
thing is, a website that looks like a device suddenly excites the brain.

The example that I like to use is the world of art. You enjoy photographs that
look like paintings and you enjoy paintings that look like photographs. And you
say to yourself, “Wow, isn’t that strange?” Well, that’s what happens simply
because your brain enjoys the novelty and error associated with it.

The same thing happens in the world of websites. When the website looks like
a device, the brain starts making choices. So rule number one is have the
number of image groups to be between three and five. Rule number two, when
you show emotions, human faces, go in the hierarchy of eyes, of lips, of bangs,
and hands. Have the background flow into the foreground. Have imagery on the
website that makes the website look more like a device than a website and
then a few more, then you’re done.

You always, as a rule, always have imagery on the left and words on the right.
Ninety-five percent of websites disobey this simple neuro-scientific principle --
imagery on the left and words on the right. When you put your menus on the
left, you’re disobeying a neurological principle. It’s a huge hit.

We could keep talking about this thing for hours but I just wanted to share with
you a few best practices that are very critical when one designs digital content

33voices.com 16
www.33voices.com
The Buying Brain (Unplugged) A.K Pradeep with Moe Abdou

be they websites or user interfaces or anything that has the consumer interact
digitally.

So our eyes will tend to gravitate towards something like this much more
than going on a website that has long sales letters and just verbage,
verbage, verbage?

Absolutely, guaranteed.

How about naming products and URLs, do you prefer long or short ones?

It all depends. There is no hard and soft rule. Anything that the brain either
immediately understands or with the most minute of efforts can figure out, is
very, very useful. Again, golden rule is to always err on the side of things that
are shall I say shorter than longer. Make it easy for the brain to process, easy
for the brain to remember.

When somebody asks you what neurofocus does, what do you tell them?

We basically use neuroscience to get at the effectiveness of advertising,

marketing and design.

33voices.com 17
 www.33voices.com
FeedBack

We believe that the best version of yourself is when you don’t have to
choose between doing what you love and making a living. So if you’re stuck
or simply want an extra spark of inspiration, please tell us how we can help.

What Are You Struggling With?

ASK A QUESTION THINK WITH A.K