The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind by A. K. Pradeep

a slightly different genetic make-up than they do. This ensures a healthy, robust population, with a sizeable immune system.
    Olfactory Environment Marketing
    We know, for example, that the soft scent of lemon increases sales in seafood restaurants. The subtle smell of grass near the dairy aisle could take consumers back to a simpler, more carefree time, and subconsciously remind them of the fields the products come from. In high-end car or luggage stores, the rich, deep scent of polished leather calls to mind luxury, relaxation, and reward. In clothing stores, the invigorating scent of the sea or the romantic mix of roses and violets suffuses the experience and makes purchasing a product associated with those memories powerful. Realtors know that cookies baking seduce buyers into considering a “property” a home.

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    The Five Senses and the Buying Brain
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    Proust’s Madeleine
    Perhaps the most famous adage to memory from smell and taste comes to us from Marcel Proust, who experiences a soul awakening from a smell/taste combination he experienced as a child: No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine, which on Sunday mornings at Combray . . .
    my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or ti-sane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it .
    Taste
    Breast milk is the first thing most of us taste and it primes us for a preference for sweet, warm foods. At the perfect temperature, accompanied by love, rocking, a sense of safety, stroking, smiles, and coos, it’s a delightful debut into a world of senses that await us for the rest of our lives.
    Every creature on Earth has a way to take in nutrients. In our case, it’s the mouth, whose main job is to hold the tongue, a thick, mucousy slab of muscle. But, in humans and other higher life forms, the mouth holds an even higher charge—to bring us taste in all its symphonies, the revelation of a great wine, the paralysis that occurs after a bite of the chocolatier’s best, or the face-contorting delight of a curry with just the right balance of spice. As with most of our other senses, taste is also a powerful deterrent, immediately laying down aversions to tastes that are against our better interests.
    Taste and Smell
    Although different, smell and taste share a common goal and often operate in synchrony. For example, like smell, taste is a chemoreceptor, meaning that both senses specialize in detecting the chemical scents and tastes we encounter. While they are separate senses with their own receptor organs, these two senses act together to allow us to distinguish thousands of different flavors.
    The interaction between taste and smell explains why loss of the sense of smell causes a serious reduction in the overall taste experience, which we

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    The Buying Brain
    call flavor. Here’s how those two senses combine to provide us the optimum experience of flavor.
    Taste signals in the sensory cells are transferred to the ends of nerve fibers, which send impulses along cranial nerves to taste regions in the brainstem.
    From here, the impulses are relayed to the thalamus and on to the cerebral cortex for conscious perception of taste.
    We tend to smell something before we taste it. Often, mere smelling is enough to make us salivate. Of the two, smell is the first on the scene. Smell hits our brains very quickly. It takes 25,000 times more molecules of cherry pie to taste it than to smell it.
    Desires
    It may seem like it’s all about ice cream, but really it’s