For 1 and 2, which airlines would you feel the safest to fly with:
- Ryanair (low cost) or American Airlines
- EasyJet (low cost) or Delta Air Lines
You probably selected the two American airlines. I would probably have done the same. However, statistics show that the two low cost companies are the safest compared to the American ones. In the light of these figures, would you change your mind? I guess probably not.
So why these statistics have not convinced you? How can I persuade you? How persuasive is a statistic opposed to a gut feeling? The answer is not very much. I tried to find out why. The best answer I found is linked to how the brain works.
This amazing TED talk explains what I am about to detail in this post. In our brain, the limbic brain is responsible for all our feelings such as trust, loyalty and so forth. More importantly, this part of the brain is also in charge of the process of decision making. Unfortunately, limbic brain is not wired to include a language feature, which means you cannot talk to the limbic brain with only facts. You need to use feelings to reach it. This impacts directly the way we communicate to persuade people. The usual steps used to convince someone start from a ‘what’ then a ‘how’ to finish with a ‘why’. Let me give you an example with a computer company:
- Everybody knows the ‘What’ (what you do): computer, laptop
- Some knows the ‘How’ (how you do it): unique selling point, differentiating factors
- But only very few knows Why (you do what you do): your cause, belief, purpose
An ad from this company could look like: “Buy my computer because they are the 70% fastest that the ones of our competitors (‘what’). They are the fastest because we developed our own state-of-the-art CPU (‘how’)”. The ‘why’ is often skipped.
Are you ready to buy one of these? Not really.
What happen if you communicate from the ‘what’ to the ‘why’?
People will understand statistics, figures or features but it does not drive behaviours. Why? Because you do not reach the limbic brain which ultimately controls human behaviours and decision making. So the neocortex in charge of the ‘what’ level is able to analyse the figures but that will be in conflict with the famous gut decision of the limbic brain.
“People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.”
If you reverse the process, which means to start communicating with the ‘why’ to the ‘what’, you will be able to talk to the brain that drives behaviours and then you rationalise it with the facts.
If I try now to convince you to buy a computer using this method, it would look like: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status-quo, we believe in thinking differently (why). The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed and simple to use (how). We just happen to make great computers (what).
Do you want to buy one? I bet yes.
Energized Century 