In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.

– Coco Chanel, fashion designer

Do you remember the second stimulus: contrastable? If you want your prospects to see the difference between your solution and your competitors' solution, then you need to clearly differentiate by highlighting your claims. The primal brain of your audience seeks a variance in its environment as a prompt for action. If you are not selling something unique, you are selling as much for your competitors as you are selling for yourself.

Most likely, you have many competitors who all offer products or services very similar to yours. Look at your home page; are you saying, “We are a leading provider of…”? Now look at your competitors' homepages; are they using the same “we are the leading provider of…”? If so, how much contrast does this provide? How will that help the primal brain of your audience see, understand, and remember why they should choose your apple in a stack of identical apples unless of course you offer the biggest apple!

To differentiate your claims, you need to use the Von Restorff effect to your advantage. First discovered in 1933, and later confirmed by many researchers, this cognitive bias states that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered. To make your solution stand out, you need to say: “We are the first/only/best provider of claim 1, claim 2, claim 3.” Researcher Erin MacDonald at Stanford wrote: “Generally, product differences prove to attract more attention than commonalities” [143]. Also note that most messages focus on what the vendor does rather than why the customers should buy. To stand out and construct a message that is friendly to the primal brain you need a clear set of claims, emphasizing why they should choose your product. Simply imagine that you are writing a book entitled Why Buy from Us? We recommend that the book should have no more than three chapters (see Figure 6.1).

Your claims are the titles of the three chapters in your book (three is the maximum). As discussed in the section on memorable in Chapter 4, researchers have found that working memory can only hold and manipulate between three and five items, hence our recommendation to select no more than three claims [144]. Later, we will also insist that you maximize both the understanding and the memorization of your message by repeating the claims consistently throughout your communication [145].

Claims represent a critical concept at the center of NeuroMap. When companies talk about who they are and what they do, it creates little or no interest because of the self‐centered nature of the primal brain. Therefore, you should translate the who you are and what you do into a clear, concise, and convincing story about why your prospects should choose you. The following are a few examples of well‐known companies who have used a strong and consistent claim.

WELL‐KNOWN CLAIMS

Consider Volvo. Why would people want to buy a Volvo? Most people will say “safety” in just a few seconds. If we had to write a book titled “Why Buy a Volvo?” there would be only one chapter in that book – although we might then see three subchapters under the main chapter on safety.

Think now about Apple. The company started in April 1976, and they have historically used few claims. Why would people choose to buy a Macintosh in the 1980s and 1990s? Back then, you could either buy a PC, notorious for its complexity, or you could buy an Apple. Apple's claim for the first 30 years of its existence was “easy to use.” More recently, as Apple expanded into the cellular phone business and most computers and phones became easier to use, their main claim became: “cool to use.” Apple is not sparing any efforts to make their phones aesthetically and technologically pleasing; from the rounded edges, the slimness of the body, to face detection features, and even the shipping boxes, everything is meant to communicate coolness. That includes the price of the Apple X which broke the $1,000 threshold once believed to be the price beyond which a smartphone would never sell,…except to people who really want to be cool! In the long list of possible smartphones to choose from, including Samsung, Microsoft, Acer, Alcatel, and many more, notice how Apple stands out as the coolest one to use!

More examples of known brands with strong claims include the following:

• We're number 1 by Hertz car rental. Nobody else can be number 1, so indeed this is unique, and the suggested value is that since they rent the same cars at the same airport counters for the same price, you will most likely get a better service.
• We try harder by Avis car rental: That means they confess to being number 2 – which is unique – but which also implies that you will get better service, even better than if you were renting from the number 1 (Hertz) because, fueled by Avis's ambition to become number one, they will try harder.
• You got 30 minutes? by Domino's Pizza. In December 2007 Domino's changed their claim from “30 minutes or less or it's free” to “You got 30 minutes?” Note that the “or it's free” offered a great proof, but Dominos dropped it to avoid the public perception of reckless driving.
• The ultimate driving machine by BMW.

HOW TO SELECT YOUR CLAIMS

Defining your claims is a rather simple theoretical process, but it can be challenging. Here are three critical steps:

1. Make sure each claim is a TOP claim; TOP is an acronym for:
   • Therapeutic: Your claims should provide a cure for a pain experienced by your prospects.
   • Original: Your claims should provide enough differentiation between you and any of your competitors. To ensure your claims display enough contrast, you need to know intimately the reason your prospects would want to buy from your competitors.
   • Provable: You need to support your claims with strong proofs.
2. You should wordsmith your claim(s), so they become mnemonic, that is, they become easily memorable; one of the six stimuli!
3. When they are put together in one sentence, your claims should support your mission statement: “We are the first/best/only company to offer claim 1, claim 2, and claim 3.” At SalesBrain, we coach many companies to make sure their mission statement includes their three claims and nothing else!

CLAIMS EXAMPLES FROM SALESBRAIN CUSTOMERS

By using clear claims, you will eliminate the confusion your customers may experience when they need to decide if they should choose you! As shown in the earlier examples, in most business‐to‐consumers (B2C) businesses, it is often considered more effective to use only one claim. Before going deeper into the science of claims, let's examine a few examples from SalesBrain's B2B customers.

Carothers DiSante & Freudenberger LLP is a labor law firm with multiple offices in California. Traditionally, law firms have focused their message on who they are (their list of partners) and what they do (the type of law they practice) without a clear indication of why you should choose them. By contrast, notice how CDF makes three clear, concise and consistent claims:

Notice how these three claims are

1. Therapeutic to the pain of being exposed to risk.
2. Original to CDF: no other law firm is making the same claims.
3. Provable, and they sound good.

Commenting about her claims (see Figure 6.2), Marie D. DiSante, managing partner said, “Developing and drawing upon this clear set of claims helped us explain why potential clients would want to work with us. We've noticed how these claims centered on protecting our clients are more effective in demonstrating why we are skilled at what we do. We now have a platform to signify to clients that we protect their best interests. This makes it much easier for our attorneys to talk about why companies should choose us!”

CodeBlue is an industry leader in restoration claims management, working alongside a national contractor network to return insurance policyholders to pre‐loss condition in the fastest, most efficient, and least disruptive manner possible (see Figure 6.3).

Paul Gross, CodeBlue CEO, stated: Nine months after starting to communicate our extraordinary claims to the market, we experienced a 34.87% increase in revenues compared to the nine months prior.”

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN BRAND AND CLAIMS

Many marketing experts have attempted to precisely define what a brand is, but the concept remains fuzzy. We suggest the following definition: “A brand is a memory in the brain that connects the name of the product or service with a set of desirable benefits.”

For example, when you heard the name Volvo and retrieved from your memory what you thought about Volvo, most likely the concept of safety came to mind. This association between two concepts, Volvo and Safety, is the result of a strategic decision that was made at Volvo headquarters 60 years ago. It is then the consistent repetition of the association of Volvo with safety in most – if not all – Volvo messages that created such a strong memory in your brain. Most likely it took you less than half a second to make that association. It should be noted that this association is driven more by affect than by cognition suggesting a strong connection with the primal brain [146].

Therefore, claims are the explicit expression of a limited set of key brand attributes, carefully worded to facilitate memorization and retrieval.

Meanwhile, there is a significant difference between B2C and B2B brands. For most B2C brands, the claims (or reasons to buy) tend to be implicit. Volvo is indeed an exception. But for a B2B brand, we believe it is critical for the top executives to create clarity, consensus, and commitment on the top three explicit reasons that customers should buy their solution: the claims should be determined once and for all, and they should be the focal point of all communication.

WHY LIMIT YOURSELF TO THREE SHORT CLAIMS?

Please memorize the sentence: “I love the weather in California.” Repeat it a few times.

Now without looking at the written words on the page, try to say it backward word by word. Not easy? Why?

Because your brain's working memory can only handle a limited number of concepts at a time – typically three to five. With six words, the memorized sentence will jam your working memory. Try now to memorize the sentence: “I love California” and try to say it backward. It is easier because the message can easily be manipulated by your working memory. As you recall, the primal brain needs your message to be memorable, and organizing it under three claims will ease the processing and recall of critical information needed to make a decision.

Retrieval fluency is the ease with which information can be accessed from memory. To communicate a concept, an idea, or a complete sales/marketing message, our working memory will naturally select three to four chunks of data from a large amount of information, as well as retrieve knowledge about the topic we want to communicate, before it stores relevant information for long‐term use [147, 148]. A chunk or package of information can be defined as a thought, feeling, idea, or concept, which, on average, can be held in working memory for about 20 seconds. As soon as working memory requires a new chunk of information, it will need to dump one of the current chunks to make room for the incoming one [149]. According to Smith and Jonides [149], when we hear a message, our brain automatically classifies the complete set of information by breaking it down to three or four chunks. Then it is stored in our working memory where we continue to assign each of the chunks to one simple label or word, even if it involves a very complex concept or experience. So, when you try to communicate your value proposition by giving a detailed description of all the benefits of your solution, the message will be poorly processed and poorly remembered. On the other hand, if you organize your arguments under a maximum of three chapters, whose titles are the claims, you will achieve better understanding and better recall.

Other researchers have shown that the relationship between persuasion and objective information is an asymptotic function. Passed a certain point, providing more information, even if that information is objective, will not increase persuasion [150]. The neural basis of the verbatim effect, the phenomenon that the gist of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording, has been demonstrated and is linked with activity in the hippocampus – part of the primal brain [151].

In conclusion, selecting a maximum of three chunks of information (three claims) upfront and simplifying their expression will make your message more effective with the primal brain: it will be more easily processed, understood, and encoded by your audience!

WHY WORDSMITH YOUR CLAIMS?

Processing fluency describes the ease with which information is handled by the brain, and it has been applied to marketing, to business names, and even to finance for many years. For example, researchers discovered that, during the week following an IPO, stocks that are easier to pronounce tend to perform better than others. For example, their ticker symbols are easy to pronounce such as KAG versus KHG [152]. Moreover, studies have found significant differences in likability, quality, originality, and memorability between rhyming and equivalent but nonrhyming slogans [153]. “Rhyming as a reason” is yet another cognitive bias, a manifestation of how our perception is dominated by our primal brain: it's not so much what you say rather it is the music of what you say that makes an impact!

Processing fluency can also be improved by other means. For instance, by improving font readability. Information provided in an easy‐to‐read font is typically rated as more familiar and more trustworthy than information provided in a hard‐to‐read font [154]. Processing fluency can also be raised by using more visible colors compared to colors that are more difficult to read against their background [155]. Even information that is focused versus blurry impacts processing fluency [156].

WHAT TO REMEMBER

You should remember that the primal brain will favor information that

• Claims give your prospects the solution to their top pains
• Uses short and simple words that are easy to pronounce [157].
• Do not use more than 3 claims to not overload the working memory of your prospects
• Reads easily with fonts that are processed with maximum processing fluency and in color, which offer a pleasing contrast with their background. Verdana, Tahoma, Times are always good choices for fonts [158].
• Is pleasing to the ear, so wordsmith your claims using:
  • A repetition of the same word as in “protect, protect, protect.” This creates a META‐claim, a claim above all claims.
  • An alliteration (the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words) as in “Diagnose, differentiate, demonstrate, and deliver.”
  • A rhyme as in “Protect your time, protect your dime, protect your peace of mind” (or pain, claim, gain). In the book titled Pre‐Suasion, Professor Robert Cialdini reports, “The statement Caution and measure will bring you riches is seen as truer when changed to Caution and measure win you treasure.” There is a lesson here for persuasive success: “To make it climb, make it rhyme” [159].
  • Any other technique that creates a pleasing sound in the expression of your claims.