How neuroscience can help persuade consumers, explains Patrick Renvoise, SalesBrain

• Patrick Renvoise, Co-founder and Chief Persuasion Officer of SalesBrain takes us through the inside of the consumer’s brain and shares what pushes their ‘buy button’ at Star FLOW Fest.
• He says there is a gap between what consumers express they want and what they truly desire, which can be easily gauged through neuroscience.

Pushed by a strong desire to find out what encourages consumers to purchase and marketers to sell, Patrick Renvoise, Co-founder and Chief Persuasion Officer of SalesBrain discovered the buy button inside the brain. Since then, Renvoise has been on a journey to different countries and forums imparting his knowledge to marketers and helping them understand consumer journeys.

He spent two years researching and drafting a map that could trace what generates desire in our minds and leads us to that ‘aha’ moment. He later co-founded SalesBrain with Dr Christophe Morin and started helping marketers to achieve scientific growth.

Explaining how neuromarketing can help woo consumers, Renvoise said, “Neuromarketing is about using non-traditional marketing techniques to go into the mind of the consumer and to figure out what people really want. The issue with traditional marketing is that you ask them what they want and based on those answers, you will create a strategy to sell your product. But if we use self-reporting measures of what they want and cannot express, it will work better. For example, when you ask people, do you want more options, people will always say yes. When in reality, they may want a simpler product.”

Decoding neuromarketing’s role in advertising

Neuromarketing doesn’t take the answers at its face value. Instead, it measures the body's various physiological responses to understand what stimulates desire, what makes the brain spiral and jump to conclusion. It uses technology such as biometrics, facial analysis, voice analysis, eye tracking, electroencephalography and functional MRI to analyse the same.

To fill this gap, Renvoise suggests using six persuasion elements, as noted down in his book The Persuasion Code by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin. He recommends making the stimulus in campaigns very personal as per the target audience’s behaviour, using contrast to highlight the product’s uniqueness, making the message tangible, that is short and simple, keeping it more visual and memorable, while also keeping the message as emotional as possible.

“There are three aspects to creating memory - where does your stimulus stand inside the whole list, how much emotion you are going to communicate at that moment, and how many times you are going to repeat the stimulus,” he adds.

Considering Renvoise calls himself the Chief Persuasion Officer of SalesBrain, we googled up this unique designation, only to be asked politely, “Did you mean Presiding Officer?’ The top ten results on the search engine did not give us a hint of what role does a persuading officer play in the advertising ecosystem. So we asked perhaps the very first persuasion officer himself.

He said, “Persuasion is about getting people to behave they want, not something with what you want them to do. So my job is to persuade people that neuromarketing is the next most important thing and to help people sell, I build a map which gives them a guideline to get to persuading and to eliminate all the artistic part of persuasion.”

Renvoise says the use of neuromarketing is getting cheaper, easier and faster. The constraints of executing it in a closed environment are also fading away, which will help make it more accessible to the marketers in the coming years.