The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (16 page)

And remember, she will always be interested in finding the best deal for her time, money, and effort. Find effective, efficient means of letting her discover where those are in terms of your brand, product, or store. Remember, too, that sometimes a best buy isn’t enough. She will be willing to pay more if a product or service satisfies her requirements for her own or her family’s well-being.

Appreciate the paradox: The male brain’s highest goal is autonomy, whereas the female brain’s highest goal is community.

Critical female brain facts for marketers:

Rapid transfer of information between the hemispheres means she has
the full resources of all of her brain at her disposal at any time and can
move between hemispheres with ease and finesse. It also means women
may have an easier time recovering from a stroke if damage is limited
to a single hemisphere.

Adjusting for size, women have slightly larger prefrontal cortexes than
men. This helps allow them to control emotions during moments of
peak anxiety. This extra restraint provided a moment to determine,
for instance, if it was wise for a nursing mother to attack a predator
head-on.

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The Buying Brain

The female brain is smaller than the male brain by about 9 percent.

Smaller does not mean lesser, however; both brains contain the same
amount of brain matter; it’s just packed more tightly in the female
brain.

Women have about 11 percent more neurons in the language centers
of the brain.

A woman has a slightly smaller amygdala (controls sex and aggression).

Sex is emotional as well as physical for women, and the consequences
of both sex and aggression are much, much higher—literally “life or
death” for women.

Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have
a small country road. Men, however, have O’Hare Airport as a hub for processing
thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and
private planes.

—Louann Brizendine, MD, Author of
The Female Brain 147.8 Million

This is the number of females in the United States as of July 1, 2003. That exceeds the number of males (143.0 million). Males outnumber females in every five-year age group through the 35-to-39 age group. Starting with the 40-to-44 age group, women outnumber men. At 85 and over, there are more than twice as many women as men.

The Female Brain in Action

As with every evolutionary benefit in every species, the female brain developed to help our species survive and thrive. Anything that can make her
a better
parent or protector
will be incorporated as successful generations evolve.

The female brain is specifically designed to nurture and protect. To meet those goals, their naturally empathetic, social brains encouraged our earliest mothers to form alliances that would allow them to find food while their sisters and cousins helped them care for infants.

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share their interests. Blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, and other forms of social media help in this effort. Look for ways your brand or product can sponsor or promote opportunities for women to get together—either virtually or literally—in open forums that discuss, validate, and tie together all areas of their lives.

Today’s new mother may not have the luxury of learning how to parent by watching her kinswomen. If your brand or product relates to child care, consider giving women and their children a way to interact with each other and perhaps with experts to satisfy this innate desire to watch and learn. Consider in-store seminars for new baby care, for example, or an expert discussion on excellent books for toddlers. Book clubs, play groups, and any bonding activity that has a link to you will be appreciated and remembered. The women involved will come to see you as a trusted ally, even a member of that treasured inner circle.

Emotional memories are paramount in her decision making and in her relationships. She will build close, life-saving social networks to surround her as she raises her children. She will remember with extreme accuracy whom she can count on, and whom she can’t. These deep, trusting, reciprocal relationships will ensure that she has a reliable network to help her after childbirth, and later, with small children to tend to and feed. Your brand can become a part of her select personal network, a friend and ally she will rely on above all others. Because she is loyal and exclusive, she may shut out other suitors unless you violate her trust.

Because women remember stressful and negative experiences more than men do, do not disappoint or disillusion her. In the good old days, a bad product experience warranted 10 negative referrals. In today’s Twittering, Facebooking, e-mailing, blogging world, that single bad experience can “go viral” and instantly be transmitted to 10,000 contacts.

Her larger prefrontal cortex came in very handy for our earliest mothers.

Using these centers of reason helped her modify her responses, behavior, and emotional reactions. By not being quick to react to angry or aggressive behavior, she avoided, at worst case, a fight with a larger, stronger opponent—which could mean death to her and her infant. Her smaller amygdala has huge implications for marketers. Why is it that women don’t react as strongly to the appeal of sex in marketing? While men may appreciate overt references to sexuality, women often do not. She may well find depictions of good fathers or men engaged in conversation far sexier than depictions that focus on the body alone. There’s a reason men have a barrage of sexually graphic magazines to choose from, whereas women have chosen (with their wallets) to skip this avenue altogether.

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The Buying Brain

Authenticity is absolutely
critical
when marketing to the female brain. Be honest. Be straightforward. Use models and spokespeople who look like they really use your product or service. The female brain can detect an imposter a mile away, and not only will avoid the suspicious message, but will tell her friends about it as well (remember that network!).Very recent studies show that females have a much larger and more integrated Mirror Neuron system (more on this fascinating system in Chapter 9). These special neurons allow her to excel at what’s called “Theory of Mind,” the gift of putting oneself in another’s shoes. Women also feel events that happen to others as if they were happening to them. Men have highly functioning Mirror Neuron systems also, they just focus more on repeating an action observed.