The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (12 page)

Our need for touch soothing is so profound in humans, in fact, that touch-deprived infants often suffer some degree of brain damage. During even short separation of infant and mother, “changes occurred in heart rate, body temperature, brainwave patterns, sleep patterns, and immune system function,” according to Diane Ackerman. When they’re reunited with the mother, all psychological changes resolve almost immediately. But, physical distresses, susceptibility to disease, persist. “This experiment,” says Ackerman,

“concluded that lack of maternal contact may lead to long-term, systemic damage.”

Our Largest Sensory Organ

Our skin is the barrier between us and everything else. It gives us our shape, protects us from invaders, cools or heats us, produces vitamin D, holds our body fluids, and mends itself quickly and constantly. At 6–10 pounds,
our
skin is the largest organ in our bodies.
It is without doubt the key organ of sexual attraction. By combining eyesight and touch, primates like us excel at locating objects in space. Touch is, in many ways, the embodiment of sight.

Our fingertips and tongues are much more sensitive than are our backs.

Some parts of the body are ticklish, while others itch, shiver, or get “goose-flesh.” The hairiest parts of our body are the most sensitive to pressure, because there are many sense receptors at the base of each hair. The skin is thinnest where we have hair, too.

From mice to lions to humans, the whiskers around the mouth are exquisitely
sensitive.

Different parts of the body vary in their sensitivity to tactile and painful stimuli according to the number and distribution of receptors. Our lips excel at touch discrimination, for example, and our forearms do not.

Pain produces the most urgent response. That’s why many of our touch sensors are devoted to discovering and avoiding pain, key to our survival as a human, and by extension, as a species.

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The Five Senses and the Buying Brain

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Touch in the Marketplace

The most sensitive areas of your body are your hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips, and feet. So what? Products that touch those areas should be sensual, pleasant, soothing, and inviting.

As we discussed in the earlier portions of this chapter, your body has sensory receptors all over it, but they’re distributed unevenly. Your tongue, for example, is covered with taste buds, but your back has relatively few sensory receptors. Your fingers can brush a jacket and know instantly what material it’s made of, what shape the buttons are, even how warm it might be. Your buttocks on the other hand, provide gruff information on the hardness of the chair they sit on and that’s about it. That’s why your finger maps take up 100 times as much space in your cortex as does the map of your trunk.

Consider the sensory capabilities of the product or experience you’re selling to the Buying Brain. If your experience is to be tactile, then infuse it with great fun for the fingers, great areas of exploration for the lips!

In this chapter, we explored each of the body’s five senses to learn how best to use them to invite the Buying Brain in. We learned that: r Vision is chief among our senses, and that our Buying Brains will discount information that is not in concert with the visual stimuli it receives.

r Our sense of smell is the most direct route to our emotions and memory storage. Being linked with a pleasant, iconic smell can significantly improve a product’s success in the marketplace.

r What we hear is specialized and tuned to what interests us. The Buying Brain will easily ignore distracting or disturbing noises (along with any messages that accompany them).

r Tasting is one of the brain’s great pleasures. Linked closely with smell, the taste of a product is influenced by the neurological iconic signatures that accompany it.

r Our sense of touch is the earliest of our senses. We are sensual beings and love to be touched. Any product or experience that is tactile
must
excite and invite the sense of touch.

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The Buying Brain

r Sensory integration creates a richer degree of engagement with the consumer if you activate multiple senses that are synergistic/make sense together.

r Celebrate the body’s movement through space by incorporating it in your messages. The brain loves to see and imagine peak sensory and motor experiences.

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The Boomer Brain Is Buying

At the end of this chapter, you’ll know and be able to use the
following:

r How age affects the “hard-wiring” of the buying brain r What strategies work best in targeting consumers over 60

r How the Baby Boom cohort promises to reshape the landscape of marketing

r New learnings that replace “conventional wisdom” with a new view of the over-60 brain in action

Age and gender directly affect the hard wiring of the brain. Background, education, culture, and experience all influence how we think and feel. But, they are learned. Age and gender are not. Since they have a great influence on how the buying brain works, it’s important to look at them separately and in detail. We’ll look at the older brain (defined for our purposes as 60 plus) here, and the Female Brain in the next chapter.

In all the years of human history before the great changes brought in medicine, nutrition, and hygiene over the last hundred years,
most people didn’t age—they died.
Our society is still “learning” how to deal with what happens to a huge population, and to each individual, as we age.

Until recently, studies of brain function, in particular, were focused primarily on disease and dysfunction, not on the natural changes that healthy aging brains undergo. More recently, within the past decade, neuroscience researchers have begun to explore real-time imaging of normal brains at different ages responding to many different kinds of stimuli, including marketing. Learning about these changes and the implications they have 55

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The Buying Brain

for testing your products and messages with the aging brains who buy them puts you a solid step ahead of competitors, who still have an out-moded idea of maturity. That’s what we begin to address in this chapter and bring into full focus in Part 2 of the book.

In a very fundamental way, your brain is quite different at different times in your life. And, without debate, who you are and where you are in life makes a huge difference with regard to the “what, where, and why” of the messages to which you’ll grant attention.

For the first few years of life, your brain undergoes such enormous changes that your entire way of interacting with the world is revised several times over.

From years 11 to 14, the brain undergoes massive growth and development.

These changes continue to be incorporated and refined until about age 18, when the brain begins to settle down and assume a cognitive identity that will remain relatively stable for many years. American society offers a nod to this change in making 18 the age of legal adulthood. So when your teenager acts the way teens do, that means that his or her brain is developing appropriately, with vigor—and oftentimes, complete lack of forethought—but exactly as it should be.

From the early 20s until about 60,
the brain continues to change,
more slowly at first and then more rapidly later on. Again, within each gender, most brains are quite similar during these years, assuming all functions are normal.

So, in reality, the key factor is not so much how your brain changes at, say age 60, as it is how much your brain has changed since it reached its peak performance at age 22.

For marketers, this distinction is important. We don’t reinvent ourselves magically at age 60. Rather, our brains change over the years, sometimes quickly (as with childbirth or menopause), sometimes slowly, with a fair amount of brain-based differences evident by the age of 60 and above. So in constructing messages to adults, consider that they are still themselves, but, since they have changing, evolving brains, the way they process information can be quite different. I’ll explain this in detail in the paragraphs following.

After age 60, transformations that have been slowly occurring become more apparent. Since the huge generational cohorts of Baby Boomers are now in their 50s and 60s, this change is of enormous consequence to marketers. The largest generational segment in human history is moving like the proverbial

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“pig in the python” directly into this life stage. Currently 46 to 64 years olds,
the 44 million Baby Boomers will all be evaluating your brand,
product, package, message, and environment with mature brains in
the very near future, if they’re not already.

As they’ve done with every aspect of American society they’ve passed through before, the Boomers promise to revolutionize the process of aging, and, thus, how we market to people over 60. When Boomers were babies, Dr.

Spock emerged and parenting became a focus of our society. Then came Sat-urday morning cartoons, Hula hoops, rock and roll, Woodstock, war protests, yuppies, and now . . . empty nesters and retirees. Research suggests that these new mature consumers spend differently than their predecessors. For example, grandparents may outspend parents on toys for children. Who would market toys to 60 plus consumers? Savvy sellers who know about the priorities of the Boomer brain, that’s who.

Importantly, the Boomer generation is also the richest generational cohort in history. More than two-thirds of them have at least some discretionary income, and they have the highest average disposable income of any group, at $29,754 in 2009. That amounts to more than ten trillion disposable dollars when we consider everyone together.
Boomers also control 77 percent
of all financial assets in the United States.
They use about half of all credit cards, and spend about two and a half times the per capita average on discretionary purchases. So if you are not already marketing products and services to Mature Brains, perhaps you should be.

The new 60 is not the old 60. Whereas retirement at 65

(instituted when the average lifespan was about 62, by the way) once meant a few years in the rocking chair before fading quietly away, better health care and the sheer force of numbers and willpower that the Boomers embody has rewritten the rulebook for what it means to be 60 and over.

Attention

Recent research has shed light on a problem that stumped neuroscientists for decades: Why do our memories get worse as we age? For years, the working theory was that there is simply a decline in the ability to store things in long-term memory. But, in 2005, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, Director of the UCSF

Brain Imaging Center and NeuroFocus Scientific Advisory Board Member, performed a groundbreaking study that found a new explanation.

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Our memory abilities are influenced by our ability to suppress distractions, and it is
this ability,
among other influences, that declines as we age. This means that people over 60 aren’t necessarily more forgetful, but they are more overwhelmed by distractions. This new finding presents a huge implication, and a great opportunity, for marketers. Clearly, eliminating distractions is important when communicating with an older consumer. Keep the message obvious and direct and keep the copy and images clean and uncluttered.