The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (20 page)

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The Buying Brain

Loops were and retrieving them much more quickly than non-moms (in 17 seconds, in fact). In general and across mammal species, new moms have an enhanced learning curve, particularly when it comes to finding food, or any other activity that requires her to be away from her baby.

Merchandisers: Do
not
waste her time. Put the milk up front, close to the diapers and the organic fruit. Consider a “pit stop” portion of the store for new parents, with everything they need in one spot. They’ll thank you for it. And they’ll tell their friends and return.

Why? Anything that
brings her back to her children quickly
is an evolutionary advantage. Parenting boosts a mother’s brain to help her cope with maximum efficiency with the outside world.

Multitasking is also a great way to focus on the essential, and to ignore the rest: to accomplish the most possible in the shortest amount of time. It became a pure survival skill for ancient and modern moms and infants alike. As Patricia Ratey summarizes: “In evolutionary terms, you want a new mother to be as smart as she can be, to know the territory around her, to remember what her kids need, to pay maximum attention to the outside world.”

Essentials of motivation also shine through in new moms: Suddenly they excel at taking task ownership, making split-second decisions and living with the consequences, they become more mature, and prioritize better.

Here is just a sampling of the other super senses new moms employ:
Smell:
The brand new neurons of adult neurogenesis migrate to the mother’s olfactory lobes to provide extreme subtlety in her sense of smell.

Changes in the smell of baby, food, or environment will be interpreted and acted upon in milliseconds. Before the mother is even consciously aware of the change, she has monitored and made a decision on the source of the smell.

This enhanced ability lasts through the remainder of the mother’s life.

If you are marketing to a Mommy Brain, test her brain’s response to the smell of your product, engage her Mirror Neurons by showing others enjoying great smells in your messaging, be vigilant about the smell of the environment you invite her into; consider using “scent marketing” to reach out to her through all of those newly-formed neurons.

Smell:
New olfactory cells also help bond moms to their children. Mothers get a high from the smell of their babies and can easily distinguish their child’s scent from a host of others from another just 48 hours after birth.

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The Mommy Brain Is Buying

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Smell:
The sweet smell of an infant’s head carries pheromones that stimulate the female brain to produce oxtytocin, a “love potion.”

Sound:
The female brain starts out more sensitive to sound than the male brain. Motherhood catapults these elite hearing skills into the stratosphere.

After two nights, 96 percent of new mothers are able to distinguish their newborn’s cry from other babies’.

Indulge the Mommy Brain’s superior hearing with pleasant sounds, laughter, children playing. Do not screech, scream, or offer other painful sounds, even in an attempt at humor. She will screen them and your message
out.

Here are some other ways to reach out to the Mommy
Brain:

Consider products to relieve her neurological burden/software that reminds her of cupcake duty and peanut allergies, and so on.

Don’t change what’s working. If she’s taken you into her tribe, honor
that relationship and celebrate the particular bond she has with you and
with her children. One bad review of your brand, product, packaging,
message, or environment can easily reach national, even international,
proportions if it’s broadcast to millions via mommy blogs and the abun-dant social networking websites. If you google “Mothers Against
. . .
”

you’ll find more than 80 million hits.

Trigger Mirror Neurons. Show activities she wants to engage in, particularly the one-to-one soothing activities she engages in with her own
baby.

New mothers seek empathy and understanding. Show faces she can
identify with, babies she won’t be able to ignore, and experts and
fellow moms who share her concerns and her lifestyle.

The more a new mother feels understood, the more likely she is to
attend to/rely on you/your brand.

Emphasize safety in a positive emotional context, not through fear
tactics. Talk about how your seat belts are advanced, but not about
potential strangulation, stranger danger, or other primally fearful ideas.

Speak to the new Mommy Brain from a new perspective. She has new
filters, new interests, and amazing new abilities. Any material that
is irrelevant to them will be bounced back post haste, like a computer
spam program. She simply doesn’t have time to evaluate anything that
doesn’t obviously and immediately meet her needs.

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The Buying Brain

The Grandmother Hypothesis

Human mothers are also rare in that they survive for decades after they are no longer fertile (“senescence”). Since survival of the species is all about procreation, there must be some
evolutionary benefit
to having women around after their childbearing years are past. The Grandmother Hypothesis argues that
senescent women are the cornerstone of successful
tribes.
They make for better child care (including more food on the children’s plates), healthier children, and a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom to pass along. Many argue that grandmothers are, therefore, a key reason for our survival as a species (they also play a key role in the fitness of children in other highly-evolved, long-lived species, like elephants and great apes). Given that today’s women have increased their lifespans into the 80s, many more children are also reaping the benefit of great-grandmother care. Grandmothers are also the most likely resource for children who can’t be cared for by their parents. All that and cookies and milk, to boot. If you are fortunate enough to have a grandmother you can hug (your children’s or perhaps even your own), be sure you do so.