MHM#38 Clients choose you with their heart, not their head

For a long time, it was assumed that consumers made logical decisions about what they needed and what was in their best interest. This logical, step-by-step assessment is what led them to decide to purchase one product or service over another. This assumption led to marketing and sales campaigns often focusing heavily on features, benefits, and data, believing that this would assist in a prospective customer's logical decision-making process.

However, recent neuroeconomic research suggests that consumers tend to make decisions with their hearts first and their heads second. 

Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience, psychology, and economics to study how people make decisions. 

Initially, the emotional part of a person's brain is driving their decision, and then they post-rationalise to justify the decision they have already made.

When someone is deciding between options, their emotional reactions to each option get incorporated into how they evaluate its value. How they feel about a choice changes how valuable or appealing it seems.

If something triggers fear or discomfort, they're more likely to evaluate it negatively. If something evokes safety, trust, or pleasure, they're more likely to assign it a higher value - and are, therefore, more likely to choose it and buy it.  

How someone imagines they’ll feel in the future about a choice/purchase also influences whether they make that choice today.

After years of study to become a therapist with so much emphasis on theory, research, outcomes, and evidence, it's easy to assume that demonstrating how qualified and experienced you are is what will give a prospective client the confidence to choose you. 

However, what neuroeconomic research tells us is that although this plays a role, it's a secondary role to how a prospective client feels about you. 

When a prospective client lands on your website, directory profile or social media page, their brain is asking, "Do I feel safe here? Do I feel understood? Would this therapist get me? Could I talk to them?"

And once that emotional "yes" happens, that's when they start justifying it with logic: "She is qualified, has 10 years experience working with trauma…." etc.

Your tasks

Create website, directory profile, and social media content that speaks directly to your ideal clients and reflects back to them what's typically going on for them.

Write a list of their common challenges, fears, symptoms, how they express what they're going through, and what their desired future looks like. Then, weave this into your website and directory profile content and include it in your social media posts.

The more nuanced you can be, the more it shows that you really do get it. It tells them they'll be understood. That you specialise in working with people like them, with issues like theirs.

If your content is empathetic and evokes trust, safety, hope and connection, it can literally raise the internal value calculation in a prospective client's brain.

By helping prospective clients connect with you online, learn about you, and get a sense of who you are, your approach, philosophy of care and personality, you reduce fears and doubts and build trust and confidence. Leaving them with a feeling that you're the right therapist for them.

And this helps their brain make an emotional "yes". 

References

Subedi, K.R., 2025. Exploring the functional framework of neuroeconomics: Integrating emotions and decision-making in behavioral economics. Far Western University, Nepal. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388923726

Lempert, K.M. and Phelps, E.A., 2014. Neuroeconomics of emotion and decision making. In: P.W. Glimcher and E. Fehr, eds. Neuroeconomics: Decision making and the brain. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Academic Press, pp.219–236. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-416008-8.00012-7

Cherry, P. (2024) ‘The neuroeconomics of sales: How buyers really decide’, Paul Cherry Blog. Available at: https://pbresults.com/sales-blog/the-neuroeconomics-of-sales-how-buyers-really-decide/ 

Neuroscience News. (2024). Why we buy what we buy: The neuroscience of shopping. Neuroscience News, 15 December. Available at: https://neurosciencenews.com/neuroeconomics-shopping-neuroscience-28247/