You may not realize this, but each day you create messages to persuade others. It could be one of the hundreds of emails you regularly send to your colleagues, friends, or customers. Or you may participate in the creation of an ad, a web page, a corporate video, and slides for a sales presentation. Often, cognitive effort and money are invested in many of these tasks. However, have you ever wondered how effective all these attempts are from the perspective of people's brains? What attention can you truly recruit? What are your chances of rewiring pre‐existing beliefs and opinions? Can you trigger the “buy button” in your targets' heads?

This book will help you realize that most of your efforts to persuade others are not optimized for the brain. We are bombarded with persuasive messages throughout the day, which is why 99% of them are being ignored. They “splash” off our brains (see Figure 0.2). In The Persuasion Code, however, you will learn proven strategies to ensure your messages get through.

Simply put, the purpose of our book is to help you use cutting‐edge persuasion science to make your messages brain‐friendly. This means you will be able to convince anyone, anywhere, anytime!

This book is a long‐due sequel to the original book we published under the title: Neuromarketing: Understanding the “Buy Buttons” in Your Customer's Brain, the first of its kind to include the term neuromarketing. Since then, neuromarketing has become a vibrant field investigating the effect of persuasive messages on our brains. Against all odds, our first book was an international success with estimated sales of over 150,000 copies.

A few months after our book was released, we formed a neuromarketing agency called SalesBrain. SalesBrain became the first company in the world dedicated to training, research, coaching, and creative services using a proprietary neuromarketing model called NeuroMap. NeuroMap is illustrated to help you learn it with ease and is printed on the back of the book cover. Since 2002, over 200,000 executives have been trained on NeuroMap worldwide, including over 15,000 CEOs. With SalesBrain's help, over 800 companies have deployed innovative neuromarketing strategies to accelerate sales cycles, win strategic deals, optimize the effect of websites, brochures, presentation slides, corporate videos, and more. Many of our customers are leaders in their industry with large marketing budgets and teams of talented marketers: Avon, TransUnion, Paypal, Siemens, GE, Epson, Hitachi, along with many others we are not legally allowed to name but you would instantly recognize! Often, neuromarketing practices are considered too strategic to let competitors know you are employing them to sharpen the effectiveness of sales messages. Meanwhile, many of our raving fans are small to medium‐sized companies with limited marketing budgets and modest marketing teams. Yet, many of these companies have generated measurable advantages by using NeuroMap. That is why we can continue to claim today that NeuroMap is the only scientific persuasion model that can explain and improve thousands of messages that are designed to trigger buying decisions.

NeuroMap is based on the dominance of the primal brain on our buying decisions. The primal brain is the oldest system composed of a multitude of brain structures (see Figure 0.3). The primal brain manages critical internal states that control attention and emotional resources to address survival‐related priorities below our level of consciousness. Think of it as the operating system of your mind, a set of basic instructions that control how your computer receives input and output. Most users do not change their operating system. You can't really reprogram your primal brain either. Meanwhile, the rational brain contributes to the confirmation process of many of our decisions. The rational brain is the most recent, more evolved part of the brain. Think of it as the latest version Microsoft Office(R) for your brain. The rational brain is like a suite of enhanced applications you can learn, change or upgrade during your lifetime. This brain uses higher cognitive resources that help mediate some of the responses of the primal brain. Measuring activity in both brain systems is how we were able to decode the effect of marketing or advertising stimuli on the whole brain.

Surprisingly, persuasion is not controlled by the rational brain. Rather, it is the primal brain that dominates the process, a brain that is mostly unconscious, and preverbal. It appeared long before we started to use words to communicate.

The dominance of the primal brain in our decisions has only been revealed in the past couple of decades by researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler (both recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and 2017, respectively), as well as Dan Ariely, John Bargh, and David Eagleman, to name a few who have received public accolades. This book integrates the complex field of decision neuroscience into a proven model you can quickly use to influence the primal brain of your audience, simply but scientifically!

Despite the enthusiasm for brain‐based marketing, the size of the neuromarketing industry is still relatively small. A conservative estimate is slightly under one hundred million dollars. However, recent studies conducted by Green Book suggest that marketers plan between 10 and 20% of all their marketing budgets on neuromarketing tools and methods. In the United States alone, the market research industry is a 20‐billion‐dollar business, which means neuromarketing research services could grab between two and four billion dollars of the potential market within a few years [1].

Even though the field is now considered more mature, a wider adoption of neuromarketing has just begun. That is the reason that the sequel to our first book is so important. It provides a deep, yet practical approach toward implementing a successful neuromarketing strategy using a tested persuasion model, NeuroMap. Over the past decade, about 60 books have covered the neuroscientific value of using neurophysiological data to decode consumer behavior and advertising effectiveness. However, no book so far has demonstrated the practical and measurable value of applying messaging strategies guided by a scientific persuasion model like NeuroMap. It is our goal to take your interest in neuromarketing, scientific persuasion, sales messaging, advertising effectiveness, website conversion, and sales presentations beyond neuromarketing basics and help you quickly apply the benefits of using The Persuasion Code. To achieve that, we will provide a much more comprehensive scientific discussion on the theoretical framework supporting NeuroMap. Also, we will deliver practical, evidence‐based guidance to help you apply our persuasion model daily. Armed with both a theoretical and practical understanding of NeuroMap, you will be able to create and deliver messages that catapult the effect of all your persuasion efforts to new record levels. Unlike our first book, in which we cited few case studies and provided limited scientific references, The Persuasion Code includes hundreds of scientific references, new research conducted by SalesBrain, and never‐published‐before materials, as well as many remarkable success stories. In the past 16 years, hundreds of our customers have benefited from NeuroMap. Consequently, this book goes beyond teaching you a proven, brain‐based persuasion model. It will inspire and guide you to create your own success story.

In summary, this book will help you:

• Gain a new appreciation for the tremendous amount of brain research that can be easily applied to all your marketing, sales, and communication initiatives.
• Realize how buying choices are affected by multiple brain processes that control attention, emotion, memorization, and decisions.
• Understand how the primal brain (evolutionary older layers controlling our automatic and survival‐centric behavior), not the rational brain (newer cognitive layer), dominates the persuasion process and influences all buying decisions.
• Learn the working principles of the primal brain so you can assimilate how the complex process of persuasion works without a background in psychology or neuroscience.
• Discover scientific studies, customer stories, and learn scoring techniques that quickly illustrate how your brain‐based persuasion strategies can deliver practical, predictable, and measurable outcomes.

Finally, note that the book is structured around three major sections presenting the science, the theory, and the process of persuasion.

The first five chapters were written by Dr. Christophe Morin; in them, he presents the scientific basis of persuasion and NeuroMap. Morin's text concludes with the presentation of the first step of our persuasion process called Diagnose the Pain.

The remainder of the book is written by Patrick Renvoisé. Patrick covers the next three steps in our process to persuade with messages that differentiate your claims, demonstrate the gain, and deliver to the primal brain. Patrick uses many examples and stories to show how you can apply NeuroMap, whether you are selling simple consumer products like toothbrushes or complex multimillion‐dollar solutions. Note that this book is written in a way that allows you to skip part I and II if you want to know the HOW (part III) before the WHY (Part I & II). We do recommend, however, that you read at least the introduction before you do so.

Together, all chapters will give you access to The Persuasion Code!