stories

We talk a lot about stories here at Neuromarketing, for one reason: our brains love stories, which makes them a powerful tool for marketers. Influence expert Danny Brown (@DannyBrown) hits on a key aspect of successful stories in Why the…

One of the toughest persuasion tasks is convincing a jury in a courtroom. Car salespeople have it easy by comparison - they control the environment and have the undivided attention of the customer. Imagine if you were in a Lexus showroom…

Why is DARPA paying academic researchers to study how Hitchcock suspense films and Clint Eastwood westerns light up our brains?

Last week my post at Copyblogger, How to Write Weapons Grade Copy, focused on the power of stories to hold the attention of a customer. Here's a heartwarming ad from the UK department store John Lewis that shows how even a rather long…

A vivid story can put us in a more altruistic mode, a study shows. UK researchers looked at the two ways people think about death - abstractly or specifically. They used a detailed story which placed the reader in a burning apartment…

Conference attendees were wired with biometric sensors to find out what really engaged their brains.

In The Million Dollar Pickle (retitled after a reader suggested the original title When Stories Don't Sell wasn't that good), I retold a story about how a single bad customer service experience turned a business author and speaker into…

An ongoing story (so to speak) here at Neuromarketing is the power of stories to engage readers and listeners. Now, there's new brain scan evidence that shows a startling phenomenon: when one person tells a story and the other actively…

The power of anecdotes to persuade (see Why Stories Sell and Your Brain on Stories) is established, but there's a dark side to that power. Quite simply, an effective story can take over our brains to the point where we disregard more valid…

We know that anecdotes can be a convincing way to sell a product, particularly if the story is told by someone we trust. (See Your Brain on Stories.) Evolutionary psychology may offer a reason. Human brains evolved when we had just two…