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PLANT HEAL ANT HEALTH CARE NEUROMARKETING FOR TREE CARE Craft your message to better reach your clients' brains By Br andon Gallagher Watson M arketing can play many roles for your tree care compa- ny. Marketing can be how you generate leads; it can be how you decide which services to offer and promote; it can be your brand identity like logos or what color your trucks are, it can also include how you price your services, and what your advantages are over competitors. All of these fall into your company's marketing plan,which often focuses on getting cus- tomers to listen. Once they are listening, what are you saying? And is there a way that what you are saying could be tailored to reach your customers' brains more effectively? This is what the field of neuromarketing is studying; and with just a few simple tips, it can be incorporated in your messaging to better sell tree care. Neuromarketing — the marriage of neuroscience and marketing — began in the 1990s at Harvard when marketers started asking scientists for a better understanding of how our brains react to different messages, and why some ad campaigns have a lasting, memorable effect while others are quickly forgotten. To better understand why, scientists used MRI technology to peer into par- ticipants' brains. By evaluating what regions of the brain were activated by different stimuli, they were able to learn how marketing messages are received, and perceived, by the brain. A good illustration of the neuromarketing effect comes from one of the more successful ad campaigns of the last 50 years — the Pepsi Challenge. Starting in the 1970s, Pepsi would set up a table at shop- ping malls and ask passers-by to sample two unmarked soda cups containing Pepsi and its rival, Coke. When the taste test was per- formed blind, and the tester didn't know the brand, the results favored Pepsi almost every time. Of course, Pepsi touted that its product was preferred over Coke.However,when the taste tests were administered with the participant knowing the label name,Coke was preferred almost 75 percent of the time.When examined under an MRI, the blind taste test showed a flurry of activity in the ventral putemen, the area of the brain associated with senses such as taste, smell, etc. When the taste tests were administered with the two brands known, the ventral putemen lit up just the same as the blind test, but there was also significant activity in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortext is the "thinking" area of the brain, and it shows how successful Coca-Cola's marketing efforts have been. Our mouths may say that Pepsi tastes sweeter and should be preferred,but our brains are saying Coke makes us happy by associating their prod- 8 Arbor Age / January/February 2012 Scientists use MRI technology to learn which parts of the brain are activated by different stimuli. uct with things such as Santa Claus,polar bears and smiling kids.Our emotional brain is always in a tug of war with our rational brain, and, more often than not, our emotional brain wins.These emotions, as we'll see, are directed by an even deeper part of our brain that makes instinctual decisions of which we are not even aware. Examining the brain Since none of us are neuroscientists and don't know our amyg- dala from our subiculum, it is easier to use simplistic models to talk about the brain.You've probably heard about brain models before in terms like "right brain"and "left brain"in which the right half of the brain is the creative, free thinking side, and the left is the more logi- cal, linear side and so on. For the purposes of better understanding this neuromarketing concept,we'll use author Patrick Renvoise's "3 brains" model, which talks about an old,middle and new brain based on their function and the order in which they appeared in evolution. The "new brain" is the part of the brain that is fairly unique to humans as this is where rational thinking occurs.We take in data, organize it, and make our justifications as to why we think we decided something. This is the most recent addition to the brain and, in fact, MRI studies show that this portion of the brain does not even fully develop until age 24.Although this is the part of our brains that can make the amazing possible — such as language, science and technology — it is the hardest part of the mind to appeal to from a marketing standpoint, because, for lack of a better term, it thinks too much.We want our message to get to the part of the brain that decides, not thinks. www.arborage.com