If you’re a marketer in today’s world, it’s never been more important to understand why people buy. For all the time we spend trying to reach, engage, and drive action among consumers and our community, it’s important that from time-to-time we step back to really think about what drives human behavior, how we make decisions, and why we choose what we choose.
While we’d like to think we’re all highly rational creatures, the truth is, the decisions we make can often be much more emotional, more impulsive, and more complicated than simply evaluating our options and utilizing our executive function.
That’s Where Neuromarketing Comes In
Located at the crossroads of neuroscience (the study of the nervous system) and marketing, neuromarketing is the study of our behaviors and decisions, both conscious and unconscious, and it just so happens to be a favorite subject of mine.
Over the years, I began tracking down and consuming whatever resources I could to better understand how we make decisions, so I could better understand why consumers buy, utilizing those insights to improve marketing campaign performance.
Last week, when one of my favorite higher ed marketers, Jaime Hunt, began tweeting about neurodesign (another beautiful subgenre of neuromarketing) it got me thinking that perhaps it would be helpful to put together a reading list of some of my favorite books on the topic.
So, here we go…
The Neuromarketer’s Reading List: Seth’s Top Picks
“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
3. Why People Buy by John O’Shaughnessy
“A consumer’s bundle of wants is not a random collection but a coordinated system of wants that represents a specification of the good life. For consumers to want a certain product they must believe that the product coheres with lifestyle, values, and belief systems”.
4. Brainfluence by Roger Dooley
“Your customers can sense the passion of your people, even if they don’t process it consciously. The body language, the speech patterns, and other cues will give your customers the confidence that the person they are dealing with truly believes in your product.”
5. Methods of Persuasion by Nick Kolenda
“If you want people to perceive something more favorably, you should convey high expectations because those expectations will become a lens that will mold their perception.”
“One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.”
7. Consumer Behavior by John O’Shaughnessy
“Perceptions are what count in marketing and perceptions are a topic for cognitive psychology. Perceptions of brand image, price and brand availability - all relative to competition - influence consumers.”
“All humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear, and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.”
In Conclusion
Understanding how and why people make decisions and shape opinions is the foundation of neuromarketing - and the foundation of a great marketer.
Never forget, good marketing is math, but great marketing is psychology.
Editor’s Note
Someone once told me you can determine how interesting someone is based on how big their pile of unread books are. The hypothesis was that interesting people are curious and curious people always aspire to read more than they’ll ever have time for.
With that in mind, what did I miss? If you’re into neuromarketing too, and have a book or resource to recommend, I would love to hear it!
It never hurts to add another book to the pile…
Seth