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Your Customer’s Brain Needs Your Business to Be Different

March 16, 2010 by Lizabeth Phelps

Well, you need your business to be different–for your prospects
to pay attention and buy. Duh. But what’s the brain got to do with it?

Several attention-getting biological mechanisms are built
into the human brain, all having to do with survival. The first is
“motion.” The brain instantly is drawn to any movement. So, if
you can do a tap-dance while you give your 30-second elevator pitch,
you’re ahead of the game.

But the second is novelty. What is different and unexpected gets
the brain’s attention. According to Arnold Scheibel, director of the
Brain Research Institute at UCLA, “the brain stem has an area called
the reticular formation. It’s wired to respond selectively to the new
and exotic. This was a survival mechanism when we were on the
lookout for predators. Now, new challenges activate your reticular
formation and stimulate the growth of dendrites (strands that
connect the neurons).”

This automatic attending to what’s new is hard-wired in us.

Russell Poldrack is a neuroscientist and researcher at the University
of Texas at Austin and writes a blog for the Huffington Post. Last
October (on my birthday) he wrote a blog post about multi-tasking
and novelty.

“Novelty is probably one of the most powerful signals to determine
what we pay attention to in the world….Researchers have found
that novelty causes a number of brain systems to become activated,
and foremost among these is the dopamine system. This system,
which lives deep in the brain stem, sends the neurotransmitter
dopamine to locations across the brain…research has shown that
blocking dopamine in rats’ brains reduces the rats’ motivation,
turning them into rodent slackers.”

You can’t afford to have “buying slackers” for your business!
Dopamine needs to flow uninhibited in their brains–which will
only happen if your business is different, you speak about it
differently, you promote it differently, you look different, sound
different, go out on a limb, do what others are too afraid to do–in
other words, if you escape the wannabees!

You also need to be different when you’re delivering your world-
changing messages from the platform. Visionary entrepreneurs
love to speak for the most part (or at least recognize they need to
speak to grow their businesses)…but I have met very, very few
who give presentations and seminars that are “out of the box.”

For 3 years, I’ve made it my mission to banish mediocrity from
the stage–and for some who’ve attended my trainings, it’s a
challenge because it requires them to release very old, entrenched, 
and even lauded speaking styles. But the fact is, they have to stand
out from the crowd, rise above the din–no matter how
uncomfortable it might be at first. It’s especially necessary
because not only does novelty grab the attention of their audiences,
the “New Paradigm of Audience Leadership” accelerates learning
in the brain. So, I tell them, you need to overcome your discomfort
with “leaving the hive” because this new style gets results, it
stimulates neuronal growth in the brain–and that’s what you’re
there to do! That has to matter more than your own comfort.

To read more about The Brains of Your Audience, you can download
that report at my website, as well as The 10 Brain-Antagonistic Blunders
Businesses Make With Their Audiences. I’m also giving a free teleclass
this Thursday and April 7 on the New Paradigm of Audience leadership–
how to be NEW, attention-grabbing and EFFECTIVE with audiences,
based on the latest brain research.

Until then: here’s my question for the day–How is your business different
from everyone else who does what you do? And this one is harder–How is
it different from everyone else, period?

TOMORROW: The 2nd attention-grabbing mechanism wired into the brain…