The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind

Foreword

As a professional marketing strategist, my entire career has been about getting into the heads of buyers. I've used tools that are familiar to generations of marketers, conducting primary research about my buyers by interviewing them, and drawing on secondary sources such as analysts' opinions and studies. Then, armed with that information, I've directed my teams of both staffers and agencies to create advertisements, websites, or trade show booths and tested these efforts via a focus group or A/B testing.

Damn, I thought I was really doing it right—until I read The Buying Brain, that is.

In these pages, I learned that I've been focused for all these years on just a tiny part of my buyers' brains! Like most marketers, I've been obsessing over the tip of the iceberg—that part of the consumer that we can see, touch, and hear.

I've asked questions designed to probe consumers' conscious minds. But the answers to questions like "Do you like this ad?" and "When I mention this brand, what animal do you think of ?" and "Would you prefer red or green for that button?" seem downright quaint when compared to the potential fruits of probing the enormous activity in buyers' subconscious brains.

In this remarkable book, Dr. A. K. Pradeep shows us that as many as 95 percent of buyer decisions are made by the subconscious mind. Yes, you read that correctly!

Use of the word secret in many marketing book titles is an exaggeration at best and a fabrication at worst. But that accusation is absolutely ...