Congratulations! You have completed your learning journey on the persuasion code. Persuasion is a complex process and our objective was to give you a simple, yet scientific, step‐by‐step process to help you become much better at convincing others. In the end, we believe that persuasion is a function of how well you understand and communicate to the primal brain. NeuroMap provides a clear path toward getting measurable value from all your messages: emails, website, brochures, PowerPoints, and even commercials.

Let's review the most important teaching moments of your journey:

In the first chapter, you learned the value and power of a brain‐based persuasion model. With NeuroMap, you now can avoid the waste of sending ineffective messages to your customers, prospects, friends, family members, and more. You can avoid the pitfalls of A/B testing, and the embarrassment of disastrous campaigns or boring sales presentations. Finally, you learned that traditional marketing research methods fail to capture the subconscious mechanisms that drive persuasion. Fortunately, neuromarketing tools provide new ways to collect brain data that can objectively explain critical neurological processes subjects cannot self‐report. The strategic value of using neuromarketing comes from the possibility of answering critical research questions. As a result, the ROI of neuromarketing dollars is measurable in multiple ways. It will drastically reduce money spent in creating and deploying messages that don't work. More importantly, it will allow you and your organization to grow faster.

In the second chapter, you discovered that you do not need to be a neuroscientist to understand the critical importance of measuring more than what people can tell you about your messages. Neuromarketing is about helping you figure out once and for all what a brain‐friendly message is. You learned that the brain is a complex organ that has evolved over millions of years. The cognitive functions are relatively young in terms of evolution, whereas the neurological circuitry of our most basic survival‐centric responses is ancient. In the past three decades, numerous studies have clarified how attention and emotions affect us and influence our decisions. Neuromarketing can help companies measure neurophysiological responses people experience in front of any marketing stimuli. These responses arise from autonomic and mostly instinctual brain processes, but also cognitive and emotional processes mediated by the central nervous system. A wide variety of tools are now available to produce brain data critical to our understanding of consumer responses to marketing messages. Individually, each method can provide important insights. However, without measuring both the cortical and subcortical activity, the interpretation of brain data is incomplete and ineffective.

In the third chapter, you learned that persuasion has been studied for decades, but old models have long ignored the role played by subconscious brain structures. You also were introduced to the critical path that persuasion takes from the primal brain to the rational brain, a phenomena we call the bottom‐up effect. NeuroMap shows that persuasive messages do not work unless they first influence the bottom section of the brain, the primal brain, which reacts to specific stimuli. Once a message has “engaged” the primal brain, persuasion radiates to the upper section of the brain where we tend to process the information more sequentially. Finally, you discovered that 188 known cognitive biases can be explained by NeuroMap.

In the fourth chapter, you discovered that you can use six stimuli to persuade the primal brain. Personal helps you quickly make a frustration or pain relevant to your audience. Constrastable accelerates decisions by comparing two situations that make the best choice obvious. Tangible achieves cognitive fluency and limits the amount of energy or distraction involved in the processing of your message. Memorable creates automatic retention so that the key elements of your message get encoded in the short‐term memory of your audience. Visual appeals to the default sensory channel by which the primal brain decides. Emotional creates a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters without which your message will not trigger a decision.

Together, the six stimuli propel your message to success, achieving the optimum path of persuasion. Meanwhile, NeuroScoring your message on the six stimuli can help you correct and improve the course of your message on the path of persuasion. Check the Appendix to see how you can quickly NeuroScore your own messages before you deploy them! Finally, NeuroQuadrants also provide a simple tool to optimize the effect of any your messages.

In the fifth chapter, you learned that diagnosing pains helps you unveil the most critical decision drivers that influence your customers' behavior. Our nature is to orient our attention to messages that awaken our fears, which is why a product or solution that can clearly articulate which pains it can eliminate first will receive more consideration and create higher urgency. Once you have successfully diagnosed the top pains by conducting pain dialogues, you can quantify the importance of the pains, as well as consider creating segments or clusters of your top customers who share common pains. Additionally, we recommend that you conduct some neuromarketing research to confirm what your pain dialogues have unveiled.

In the sixth chapter, you discovered that the primal brain will favor information that uses short and simple words that are easy to pronounce and information that is clearly organized under a maximum of three chapters or arguments: your claims. Also, messages that are easy to read, with fonts that are processed with maximum fluency are preferred. Using colors that offer a pleasing contrast with their background will be most brain friendly. Wordsmith your claims to make them more memorable. A repetition of the same word (a meta‐claim) is a good technique such as protect XX, protect YY, protect ZZ. An alliteration (the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words) is also an effective technique, such as diagnose, differentiate, demonstrate, and deliver. A rhyme provides further auditory appeal – protect your time, protect your dime, protect your peace of mind…or pain, claim, gain are good examples.

In the seventh chapter, your learned that the value you talk about is not as important as the value your prospects believe in. As a result, you need to maximize, not only the amount of value they will receive but also use the best possible proofs of gain. Moreover, your value demonstration needs to be quickly understood by their primal brain. This means that you need to make that demonstration simple enough that even a non‐expert would understand it. Use customer testimonials to support your value demonstration, a demo, data or a vision. Lastly, focus your demonstration on what is unique about your solution, that is, what can be categorized under each of your claims.

In the eighth and final chapter, you learned that the most effective messages should include six persuasion elements:

1. A grabber: a short but effective way to communicate your value proposition that goes beyond simply using words and typically re-awakes the pain your customers want to eliminate.
2. Claims: the top three reasons your customers should buy from you.
3. A big picture: a simple graphical representation of how your product, service, or idea will impact the world of your prospect or audience.
4. Undisputable proofs of your gain: the primal brain is not very evolved and quite skeptical, so you should provide simple yet strong and effective proofs of your value.
5. Reframe objections to create positive emotions when your customers express resistance.
6. Close: the repetition of your claims one more time and ask: “What do you think?” Wait for their feedback and ask: “Where do we go from here?” and wait for their response.

You can further increase the impact of any of those persuasion elements by using seven persuasion catalysts:

1. Tell stories that will transport your audience in a different world where you control the emotion communicated by the punch line.
2. Use your charisma.
3. Word with you.
4. Apply contrast to increase the impact of any of your persuasion elements.
5. Vary teaching modalities: chose the modality most effective to communicate the concept you are presenting.
6. Trigger emotions to trigger faster decisions.
7. Make it short: more information leads to confusion not more persuasion!

Now the challenging work begins. You have many options when you begin the implementation of NeuroMap.

We recommend that you identify the weakest step in your current sales or advertising narrative. These questions will help:

1. Are you addressing the most relevant and urgent pains?
2. Is your message truly differentiated? Basically, are you selling something unique and using claims?
3. Are you communicating compelling and indisputable proofs of your gain?
4. Is your message easy to understand and impossible to forget? Does it reach the primal brain?

Although focusing on the weakest link of the chain first may appear logical, we recommend that you follow the sequence of the 4 persuasion steps. This means that you should first diagnose the pain and then move on from there. In our experience, skipping steps will compromise the power of NeuroMap, even if you have already done some research on the pains or identified your claims, or completed some work on the demonstration of your value proposition (gain). Rethinking all these concepts around the primal brain will greatly simplify even the most complex messaging strategy.

Second, decide if you can afford researching pains or assessing the neurological effect of your current advertising stimuli based on the cost/benefits of your value proposition. The higher the value, the more you can justify investing in research. Most companies typically invest as much as 10% of the gross margin of researching a product or solution.

Third, confirm who are the stakeholders of this process? Should you do this on your own, or should you involve your executive team? Using NeuroMap to build clarity, consensus, and commitment with your executive team on the concepts of pain, claims, gain, and primal brain will set the foundation of a solid marketing and messaging strategy for years to come.

Fourth, identify who else in your organization would benefit from learning NeuroMap, especially learning to apply effective ways to present your value proposition? The strategic nature of NeuroMap commands that the top‐level executives be involved in the process, before it is shared with the rest of the team, including sales and marketing and even R&D executives.

Finally, assess objectively your internal resources and capacity to execute successful neurocreative assets. Although the model is easy to learn, it does require a lot of “unlearning,” which some people can't or will not do.

After all the preceding questions have been addressed, you can easily determine to what extent you need external help or support.

Enjoy the journey. You can now persuade anyone, anywhere, anytime!