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

all about neurotransmitters. Some foods stimulate endorphins, morphine-like painkillers and mood elevators. These include salty foods, greasy foods, candy, and sweets.
    Carbohydrate cravings are driven by a need to increase the level of serotonin in the brain and as such, they are sedating. By the way, your cravings may even be genetic. Identical twins, separated at birth, crave the same things, while fraternal twins don’t.
    Taste in the Marketplace
    Taste stimulation is one of the senses most easily set off by the Mirror Neuron system.
    Anytime you display an appetizing product, be sure the consumer can see it being enjoyed by another. This is the key to stimulating desire, and, most importantly, to moving to purchase. See Chapter 9 for the story of “Monkey See, Monkey Do.”
    Give food and beverages a visual “voice.” Too often, we use words to describe, for example, “a tall, frothy beer” when a picture would say so much more.
    Don’t display obviously fake items, like miniature plastic tables in or around food items. They detract from the realism and, thus, the appetite the consumer generates for the product.
    Hearing
    Hearing gives us information vital to survival, for instance, by alerting us to an approaching car or fire engine. But, our sense of sound is more than P1: OTA/XYZ
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    perfunctory. Hearing allows us to generate deep, nostalgic memories associated with highly emotional moments accompanied by sound: Lullabies do lull babies to sleep. Even earlier, the mother’s heartbeat and respiration soothe and calm the baby. Later, lovers celebrate their favorite song, the laughter of children delights any ear in range, the song of birds by your window, the rocking glory of a Rolling Stones concert, and all are extraordinary treats for our brains. We mark our traditional passages with music, for example, weddings, funerals, and graduations.
    Our pupils widen and endorphins rise when we sing and there is a scientifically validated healing quality to singing. Comatose patients respond to music.
    The dying relax when music is played.
    The sounds your product makes and the background “noise” of your shopping environment are a critical part of its Neurological Iconic Signature (NIS). When the Buying Brain hears the soda sizzle, the chip snap, or the coffee sipped, Mirror Neurons fire in some urgency: “I want that! Get me that!”
    The sounds that accompany peak experience are critical to its enjoyment, and to its retention in memory. When casinos removed the tinkling of coins from one-armed bandits, I think they did a lot of damage to the fun of winning and being around winners in the coin machines. Which would you prefer: a joyous cacophony of nickels hitting the aluminum trays all around you, or a quiet prompt to insert your card to transfer your winnings?
    Touch
    If our predator’s vision is a relatively recent development in human sense ability, and our primal sense of smell is the most emotionally direct of our senses, touch has the honor of being the oldest human sense, the most urgent, and the most integral to our survival and evolution. Every other sense organ has, well, an organ you can point to: nose, eyes, mouth, and ears. But, our organ of touch is us .
    Think about it: If touch didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t sustain our relationships or produce offspring. But it does, and we do. Before he even hears his mother’s heartbeat an infant feels her warm womb swaddling him, and her respiration soothes him. In his close, calming cradle, he sleeps and wakes, rocked by the gentle rhythms of her movements.

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    The Buying Brain
    As you must now expect, early humans who did more touching produced lasting pair bonds and healthier infants who survived to produce