Book Review - The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind
By Dr A K Pradeep
3rd September, 2010
Dr A K Pradeep has produced in The Buying Brain a highly readable book on Neuromarketing which concentrates mainly on the applications of the insight derived from Neuroscience, rather than the Neuroscience itself. The non-expert reader has a lot to gain from this book, although they will not learn how Neuromarketing is done on a day to day basis.
For the casual reader the book is packed full of insights into human behaviour, and it has a contender for Chapter Title of the Year in “Your Customer’s Brain is 100,000 Years Old”. This chapter was my particular favourite and contained the fascinating fact that “As little as 70,000 years ago, there were as few as 2,000 mating pairs of humans”. There are so many interesting facts and anecdotes of this sort that this is one of those rare text books that makes entertaining reading.
My slight disappointment comes from the fact that the contents of the book make one hungry for more details and secrets. Early in the first part of the book Dr Pradeep makes the client’s point of view that “Neuromarketing cannot be a set of ‘cool, cute ideas’ but must be a systematic process and framework that can live and flourish in the workplace and workflow of my corporation”. There are lots of cool, cute ideas, but it is the systematic process that the book is missing.
Obviously any company using a technique as new to market as neuroscience will have commercial concerns about what it reveals of its processes, and Dr Pradeep does say “The exact equation that generates our Effectiveness NeuroMetric is, of course, a closely guarded secret”. No reasonable person would expect the “exact equation” but I would have liked a bit more of the nuts and bolts preceding the ultimate use of the algorithm.
One of the main “take aways” from The Buying Brain is that the human brain “loves puzzles and humor” and there are plenty of both in this excellent book, which makes difficult points easy to understand and is a fine introduction to the way in which Neuroscience is currently being used by marketers.
Teresa Lynch
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