Sean D'Souza:
"The Brain Audit"

Important note: This is an independent and critical book-review - not a sales letter or an ad!


Format

Ebooks, PDF-format.

Review

Please note: This review is part of my review of Sean D'Souza's package, "Psycho Tactics".

What is this book about?

Sean D’Souza’s book, “The Brain Audit” focuses on a very interesting and important subject: How you can customize your marketing messages according to the laws of the human brain. Or said with different words: The better your Marketing message correspond with the way your target prospect thinks, the better results you’ll get.

This is really commendable. Actually it’s one of the aspects I most often miss in many of the Marketing books and courses I’ve read and studied. It’s so easy to give people the impression that effective Marketing is based on a list of set, cemented laws – laws that sometimes may seems to be rather artificial on first look.

But nothing could be farther from the truth! The really effective Marketing principles and strategies are far from being artificial. There’s a good reason why some Marketing techniques work while others don’t: The really effective ones are based on how close they work according to the rules of the brain.

And that’s what Sean D’Souza tries to elaborate on in this interesting ebook: He wants to show his readers a completely different way of communicating your marketing messages in today's competitive climate.

Sean D’Souza starts out with a really interesting reflection on what is the most important psychological trigger in your marketing message.

Almost every marketer will tell you that benefits are very important in your marketing messages. And to many marketers benefits equal a strong promise or a solution. To these marketers a strong promise or a solution is the best and most effective psychological trigger.

Says Sean D’Souza:

“This is normal everyday communication and sitting as it is in a sea of advertising, it entices almost no one. Yet almost 90% of the world’s communication uses this system of messaging to sell their product or service.” (Page 9).

According to Sean D’Souza it’s much more effective to base your Marketing messages on the problems people already have, than to base them on solutions to their problems.

In my opinion this is correct. If something hurts, people are much more open to a sales message that directly addresses their problems. By doing this you built what’s often called, “rapport”, with your potential customers.

And I totally agree with Sean D’Souza that if in your Marketing messages you directly target the problems people have, your messages will be more effective.

However, just like many other marketers before both Sean D’Souza and myself have said, I think that problems and solutions very often overlap each other. Ideally, they often should overlap each other.

Sean D’Souza seems to agree on this. Because in the following sections he seems to combine both perspectives: Problems and solutions.

When this is said, I agree with Sean D’Souza that way too many marketing messages focus solely on offering solutions to their potential customers. This has also been emphasized by several other famous marketers, such as Dr. Jeffrey Lant who systematically uses the same approach in his marketing messages.

In addition to focusing on problems and solutions in your marketing messages, Sean D’Souza also covers…

• The importance of focusing on your target market.
• How to anticipate and respond to objections.
• How to use stories to convey your message.
• How to minimize the perceived risk of ordering through you.
• How to differentiate your offer from all others.

The chapter, “Your Core Marketing Message”, is really good. It’s short, but right to the point. In this chapter Sean D’Souza helps you step by step to create your own clear Marketing message that corresponds to the way your potential customer’ brain works.

In the rest of ”The Brain Audit” Sean D’Souza develops his system for creating marketing messages that corresponds to the psychological mindset of the typical customer.

The system consists of what Sean calls The Seven Red Bags. These seven bags are vitally important parts of really effektive marketing and sales messages. When you know these seven points and create your marketing messages with them in mind, then you'll have a much better chance of succeeding, says Sean.

He shows how the human psychology determines how to your potential and existing customers receives your marketing and sales messages. According to Sean D’Souza the success or failure of your messages is not a question of how much money you put into your campaigns. Rather, it's a question about how well your messages correspond to the psychological mindset of your target market.

The better you understand the mindset of your readers, listeners and viewers, the better equipped you'll be to create highly targeted sales messages that get positively received and create the results you want to get.

According to Sean D’Souza, you have to discover the reasons why people buy from you or don't. When you know these reasons, then you'll be in a much better position to twist and customize your messages according to the wants of your customers and make them come 'alive'. If you don't have this information, then you don't have a reliable and objective standard and measure for how to create the optimal marketing messages.

What is good in this book?

I like the new edition of Sean D’Souza's book much better than I liked the first edition. Most books can be improved, and Sean has definitely done his best to explain his concepts and ideas much clearer and better than he did in the first edition of his book.

Sean D’Souza is obviously a sharp marketer and communicator, and he seems to know his stuff very well. But it's also evidient that the new edition is based on even more real-life experiences that the first edition. Sean has updated and sharpened his marketing system, and the result is now a really interesting and most useful communication system.

There are so many useful points in Sean D’Souza's "Brain Audit". For example, I really like his examples on page 35 showing you through word-by-word examples how to create highly intriguing but also super effective messages. By making a few, small but genius changes to your messages, they'll draw the attention of your target market like a strong magnet.

In "Brain Audit" you'll also discover an easy way of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing and sales messages. Unlike many other ways to tracking the effectiveness of sales messages, this is an easy way that you can use almost immediately.

So, I think "Brain Audit" gives you a really good and effective communication system that you can use to make your sales messages much more effective.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't supplement this communication system with some of the other good marketing and copywriting systems out there. You definitely should - especially the lessons taught by the old copywriting masters.

Finally, Sean D’Souza has an engaging writing style. His books seem interactive, and he often illustrates his points with different illustrations. He also does his best to engage you, the reader, by participating in a dialogue with you when you read the book. Besides, Sean has added helpful summaries after each lesson in the book.

All in all I think that Sean D’Souza has created an ebook that contains many, really useful marketing and communication strategies.

I really like the step-by-step process Sean takes you, the reader, through. This process makes it easy for you to grasp and apply the lessons in this book.

What could be better?

I have one minor complaint about this book: It’s a bit sad, that in such professional looking ebooks like these, the tables of content aren’t “clickable”. By this I mean, the headlines and sub-headlines don’t work like links you can click on if you’d like to go to the corresponding part of each ebook. It certainly improves the navigation of an ebook, published in the PDF-format, if you can do this. But I admit that this is a minor criticism that doesn't subtract in any way from the main impression of this fine book.

Overall assessment

There are many, many fine points in this book by Sean D’Souza. I’m convinced that if you follow the communication system you'll learn about in "Brain Audit", you'll get much better results from you marketing and sales messages.

"Brain Audit" contains a genius way of creating or changing your marketing messages so that you'll attract much more attention from your target market and get more orders. And you can use these principles in all kinds of messages: Sales letters, ads, personal contact, commericals, signs etc., etc.

So, all in all, there are really many good and useful points in this book. However, that’s also the problem – the treatment of each point is too general. You miss the more detailed stuff.

This doesn’t mean that volume is something good per se. It’s much, much better to write a short book with quality information than to write a long, thick book with very little or even none quality information.

But when all comes to all, you still need enough details to go ahead and apply and practice what you’ve read.

I think ”The Brain Audit” gives you a good overview over how to craft effective marketing messages that correspond to your customers’ mindset.

I think Sean D'Souza’s emphasis on problem-focused messages is partly right. But no matter what, there’s no doubt that this focus is missing in most marketing messages.

Buying information 

Web site

http://www.psychotactics.com

Postal address

Sean D'Souza
PO Box 36461,
Northcote, Auckland,
New Zealand

E-mail

sean@psychotactics.com

Phone

Phone: +64 (9) 449 0009
Mobile: +64 (21)236 1415