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Book Review: How We Decide

Guest post by: Jay Hamilton-Roth

Article Overview: I’ve always known that a marketing message should “connect� with your prospective customer’s emotions. The traditional explanation has been that emotions truly rule the decision making process. This book explains why this mantra isn’t quite right.

Book Review: How We Decide

I’ve always known that a marketing message should “connect” with your prospective customer’s emotions. The traditional explanation has been that emotions truly rule the decision making process. This book explains why this mantra isn’t quite right. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter chemical in our brain, controls not only the “pleasure center” but all of our emotions. Dopamine neurons send and receive these chemicals based on different inputs. For example, prediction neurons produce dopamine when they anticipates a pleasure (think of Pavlov). Our brains continually are fine tuning our receptors based on real-world trial-and-error.

Our emotional brain is a stew of these dopamine receptors. Think about seeing someone you love. Do you tingle? It’s dopamine coursing through your body. Now think about an almost car-crash you were in. Does your breath get shallow? It’s dopamine again.

We assign emotions to certain physical responses: love, fear, hate, etc. Not everyone defines the responses the same way, but we all know how these emotions make us feel. When it comes time to make a decision, we weigh the emotional brain’s answer (”a hunch”) with the rational brain’s (”calculated results”).

While we can explain how our rational brain answer arose (”…based on a class I took last year, the answer is obviously …”) we have an almost impossible time explaining our emotional brain. The emotional brain, it turns out, is wired to our unconscious. And our unconscious has been programmed by our lifetime of dopamine receptor programming. Our unconscious is processing information that our rational brain doesn’t perceive.

So what does this all mean to your marketing? It means that while we’re trying to evoke certain emotional responses, we need to talk directly to the emotional brain (and bypass the rational brain). A careful reader will read your marketing copy, think about the words, and in thinking, may trigger the emotional brain’s response. A graph showing improved results likewise requires the rational brain to interpret the message. What we need to do is appeal to another set of neurons in our brain: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are what make us feel empathy. When we see someone smiling, we feel happier because our mirror neurons are giving us the same physical response as if we were smiling. It’s true for all of the emotions that people express around us. (Aside: It turns out that one of the causes for autism are non-functioning mirror neurons. People can see other’s physical responses to emotion, but their mirror neurons aren’t causing the feeling within their own bodies.). Therefore, to evoke an emotional response, we need to trigger the mirror neurons. And the best way to do this is with images and sound. An image of someone happy makes us feel happier. We know that a great movie plays with our emotions (mostly controlled by our ears).

The goal for any marketing message is to arrive unfiltered to your prospect. Not only past the spam filters, but the emotional filters as well. Pick your images and sounds well, and you’ll likely trigger the mirror receptors to evoke the emotion. As a prospect, it means that when it comes time to make a decision, you need to understand the kind of decision you’re being faced with and the type of thought you need to solve it. You need to think about how you think.

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Article Tags: brains, car crash, chemicals, decision making process, dopamine receptors, emotional brain, emotional responses, emotions, hunch, impossible time, lifetime, mantra, pavlov, physical responses, pleasure center, prospective customer, real world, traditional explanation, trial and error, unconscious



Related Forum Posts
Re: Top 50 Lists - Hi Evan, How about "Top 50": -Inventor Blogs To Watch -Franchising Blogs To Watch -Business Book Review Blogs -Women Entrepreneur Blogs -Young Entrepreneur Blogs
My reading log - Hi OmnivoreInk, Before starting my business, I read the following books as research: -"The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki -"The AdSense Code" by Joel Comm -"Don't Think Pink" and "Mind Your X's and Y's" by Lisa Johnson And since then I've continued my "research" by reading (in this order): -"Technical Tennis" by Rod Cross -"For One More Day" by Mitch Albom -"The Twits" by Roald Dahl -"Little Black Book of Connections" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne -"The Profitable Retailer" by Doug Fleener -"Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell -"Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" by C.S. Lewis -"Little Green Book of Getting Your Way" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling And I'm currently reading and am in the process of finishing the following: -"There's No Such Thing as Public Speaking" by Jeanette and Roy Henderson -"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell -"The Book of Tells" by Peter Collett -"Little Red Book of Sales Answers" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience" by Jonathan M. Tisch -"The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" by Julia Cameron -"The Inner Game of Tennis" by Timothy Gallwey
Re: Significance of Review Sites - Exactly! Review sites are very helpful for providing better understanding to a product or service.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: Where to focus your time? - I would agree with Evan here that focus is important. Unfortunately what happens especially to internet entrepreneurs is that they tend to get easily sidetracked and there is so much on the internet to feed this tendency that one needs to be particularly vigilant about avoiding it. Decide what is most important to work on first for your business and focus on that until you achieve what your goal is before moving on. MichelleJ


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