Emotion, Logic or Trust: Which Buy-Button Now Matters Most?

When it comes to making a purchase decision, there are three buttons in the buyers brain, that when stimulated, can help to motivate the buyer from "Do Nothing" to "Yes". These three buy-buttons go way back, some 2,600 years ago to Aristotle, and have been confirmed by modern neuroscience and represented in the triune model of the brain.

The three buy buttons are:

1. Emotions: The R-complex or Reptilian Brain aligns with Aristotle’s Pathos: When triggering the Reptilian brain, it is essential to appeal to people’s emotions. Messages that suggest safety, security, or danger can be used to create a sense of urgency or fear that motivates people to engage, take action and move from “Do Nothing” to “Yes”..
2. Logic: The Neocortex aligns with Aristotle’s Logos:?When triggering the Neocortex, it is essential to present facts, statistics, and evidence that demonstrate the value of your product or service and deliver tangible research, proof-points and financial justification. Messages that quantify investment value, savings, quality, and rational benefits can be used to persuade people and buying teams to make a logical decision, prioritize investments in your solution over other options, and justify signoff for those involved in the purchase who are not emotionally connected to the solution..
3. Trust: The Midbrain aligns with Aristotle’s Ethos:?When triggering the Midbrain, it is essential to establish your credibility, authority, and trustworthiness with specific customer success stories, transparent reviews and video testimonials. With purchase decisions so risky, the buyers need to believe that you can deliver the promised solution and outcomes AND that the business can successfully implement the solution (with your help and assurance services) to achieve the expected personal, organizational and business benefits.

Until research was provided otherwise, most would say that business decisions were all made logically, with very little emotion coming into play. As “the ROI guy” and one who automated business ROI calculations to help in marketing, sales and better business decision making for the past thirty years, I was firmly in this camp early on.

However a plethora of neuroscience studies over the past decades proved my initial thoughts misplaced.?Although logic comes into play it is mostly leveraged to provide justification AFTER the seeds of a buying decision have been firmly planted and sprouting. Don’t get me wrong, Logos is still very important, especially in achieving alignment amongst buying team members, prioritization across different decision options and executives sign-off. However, if you just focus on logic with your buyer, the decision may not go your way – with buyers deciding to stick with status-quo or going with a competitor that was able to better inspire or build trust. The conclusion I reluctantly accepted some time ago: decision making is less about logic and more about sparking a buyer’s emotions, building trust and mitigating decision regret.

When looking at a typical decision, the buying team is estimated to rely about 25% on Logic in the decision process. When it comes to Emotions and taking a Challenger-like selling approach so popular a decade ago, this used to be the majority decision factor. In recent years however this has changed, and Emotions and the R-complex now attribute less than 50% of the decision-making weight.?

As a result, our current estimates are that purchase decisions are based on:

• 25% – Logic
• 33% – Emotions
• 42% – Trust

With the current macro-environment under financial stress, Ethos and Trust are now the most important decision-making factor. Buyers see it absolutely vital in a financially uncertain, risk averse environment to:

1. Trust you as a solution provider?to actually deliver on what you said you would – a solution that quickly works as advertised and most importantly delivers on expected outcomes
2. Trust the internal capability?that the buyer’s organization can actually implement and take advantage of the solution, managing the change and transformation process to actually implement the solution with the anticipated investment and achieve the expected outcomes and ROI.

Because every purchase decision is vital, and it can mean the decision makers job if they get it wrong, it's no wonder that building, gaining and maintaining Trust is the most important decision factor.

Click here to learn more - Leveraging Aristotle and the Three Buy Buttons in the Brain - https://geniusdrive.com/leveraging-aristotle-and-the-three-buy-buttons/