The Brain Audit

It’s not surprising to find out Sean D’Souza was a cartoonist before writing The Brain Audit.  Along with an entertaining thumbprint-style cartoon character appearing on most pages, it’s reflected in his jaunty writing style.
Like many of today’s business and personal incentive books, the message in this 150-odd page publication comes with summaries, checklists and in this case, website strategy workshops. 
D’Souza says he has done this to ensure we absorb the information. 
“The book is not a magic potion but gives a deep insight into what makes our brains respond and what causes our brains to ignore a message”.
It’s about Psychotactics – understanding psychological marketing ideas or learning the psychology behind what makes your customer’s brain tick.
This isn’t the first version of The Brain Audit, but as D’Souza explains it does contain new concepts, including checklists.
To understand why a customer decides to buy or to forego a purchase or service, it is suggested the brain works like a conveyor belt. 
The story goes that if you loaded seven bags onto the plane, you wouldn’t leave the airport without taking all your bags off the conveyor belt. Similarly with a customer, “If you don’t take the bags off, they go around and around in his head and that prevents him from buying your product”.
It looks at how all the bags, or steps, play a role in getting a customer’s attention, keeping that attention, and getting the sale.
The bags, numbered one to seven are identified as:  The Problem; The Solution; The Target Profile/The Trigger; The Objections; The Testimonials; The Risk Reversal and The Uniqueness.  
Each chapter focuses on a bag as D’Souza outlines how a solution may or may not engage the brain, but a problem always gets our attention. This means having to curb our natural tendency to put a solution first and instead demonstrate how our product or service will solve multiple problems.  
The Epilogue is where we learn D’Souza was a professional cartoonist for 15 years. He had enough work without marketing, but was effected by the way work came erratically. This caused him to read every biography and book on marketing, management, spiritualism and history he could lay his hands on – and from that mixed reading list came The Brain Audit. 
This engaging book is a useful marketing tool and ends with two pages devoted to the book’s cartoon character, Cuatro. 
Usefulness: 8.5/10
Linda Donald is an Auckland-based freelance writer and book reviewer. Email: [email protected]