The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (13 page)

Let the message “breathe” with some white space around it. And avoid the impulse to “load up” messages with sounds, running screens, and quick-time animations. Not only are distractions detracting from your message to seniors, most of that content is not even making it past the brain “filters” of Boomer consumers. Teens will enjoy the multiple screens and a fast-paced experience.

Grandmothers will not.

New Learnings

We all have stereotyped images of what it means to grow older (that’s also part of being human), but until very recently, we haven’t had much science to contradict them. Just as it’s done with every other aspect of consumer knowledge, thankfully, neuroscience has begun to unravel some of the mysteries about what happens to the brain as we age. We are now able to measure older brains’ responses to stimuli rather than to rely on outdated notions that our grandparents might have held (or what we remember thinking we thought they thought—a very dangerous paradigm for developing brands, products, packages, messages, or environments!). While this is a rapidly evolving area of research—and there is much we do not yet know—what we do know and what we are finding out nearly every day indicates that
there are decided benefits
to having an older brain
and yes, there are some deficits to consider as well. For example, a staggering 13 percent of Americans over 65 fall victim to Alzheimer’s disease. However, in terms of healthy adult brains growing older, the news is far better than we might have presumed.

The Big (Older, Happier) Picture

A growing body of scientific evidence supports the theory that, despite the top-of-mind cognitive and pathological declines that can appear as we age, normal, healthy adults have skills to help them manage their emotions in profoundly different ways than their younger peers. Not only do they experience negative emotions less frequently, they have better control over the negative emotions P1: OTA/XYZ

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they do contend with. Equally as importantly, older brains also rely on a more
complex and nuanced emotional thermostat
that allows them to bounce back quickly from adverse events. Older adults, in fact, strive for emotional equilibrium, which in turn affects the ways their brains process information.

Functional reorganizing, enhanced compensation strategies, and effective intervention tools are among the most important benefits of having an older brain. As Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz and Cindy Lustiz note, this combination provides older brains with a “more positive emotional bias than younger adults have.” Put another way, this could be an empirical neurological basis for the idea of “wisdom” or “emotional intelligence.” Older adults have the experience not to view every bump in the road as catastrophic, and they have the coping skills for modulating what they feel during the particularly bumpy portions of the road. What didn’t kill us “then” probably isn’t going to kill us now.

The idea is that, when we market to the Boomer brains, it’s not only appropriate but also
effective
to “accentuate the positive.” Gloom and doom are
not
the way to reach an older audience, nor are portraits of a short, somewhat bleak future. Rather, focus messaging on the wit and wisdom of older consumers. Look, with them, on the bright side.

Studies have shown that the amygdala (remember, that’s the brain area devoted to primal emotions like fear, anger, and happiness; see Chapter 4

for details) in young people becomes active when they view both positive and negative stimuli. But, in these new studies,
the amygdala in older people is
active only when they view positive images.
They’ve learned to overlook the negative, at least when it’s not impacting them directly.

Another way to look at this is that younger brains, unaware of what’s ahead and how best to deal with it, cling to negative information, processing and reprocessing it in an attempt to predict and prepare for their uncertain futures.

Older brains, on the other hand, have a lifetime of experiences, full of positive or at least nondisastrous events to help them. They no longer attend to the negative and may in fact “disattend” or avoid the negative. Seen in this light, the older brain’s tendency to spin information positively is a hard-won life skill and age-worthy brain development, not a na¨ıve perspective.

Another reason for the “positivity shift” that comes with aging may be that older adults put more emphasis on regulating emotion than do younger adults, and they do so with a greater
motivation
to derive meaning from life. To get P1: OTA/XYZ

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The Buying Brain

to that point, older adults may focus on ideas, activities, and people that bring pleasant feelings and reinforce positive visions of themselves.

So, in addition to presenting material positively to older adults, be sure you provide them with a positive spin on it that clearly relates back to themselves. Older adults like to feel good about who they are and how far they’ve come. They’ll attend to your message with pleasure if you provide them with a way to relate that information positively to themselves and the positive self-portraits they’ve developed.

On the flip side of this positive bias is an interesting quirk of the aging brain I touched on earlier—a tendency to overlook the negative. It’s called

“preferential processing,” and several studies have highlighted it (see the Notes section for details). They indicate that, when presented with a negative message, as you might find, for example, on a warning label or some ad messaging, older brains can “delete” the
NOT
and remember it as a
DO
over time. So, “do not take with juice” might be recalled as “take with juice” after several repetitions, even if those repetitions are processed with relatively high attention.

If you’re thinking that this information is only relevant to caregivers, I’d encourage you to think again. “Do not neglect your IRA” could have the opposite of your intended effect, as could “Don’t forget” the milk.

Luckily, the fix for this bias is relatively simple: Craft messages for older brains in positive, not negative terms. Say: Remember the milk, the IRA, the brand, not “Don’t forget” it.

Emotional Resilience

A related benefit to having an older brain is the resilience that comes with it.

After all, by the time you’ve earned an aging brain, you’ve most likely seen it all—and have experience dealing with it. This doesn’t mean you’ve triumphed over every adversity. Think back to a few things that caused you to lose sleep in your 20s (Does my boss like me? Should I have been more “visible” at the meeting?) and see what your gut reaction is to them now. More than likely, you’ve learned to “let the little things go.” And, if you’re an expert at resilience, you may have learned that “most things are little things.”

This “
don’t sweat the small stuff
” idea can successfully underpin most of your marketing messages to older adults. They don’t need to dwell on every tiny detail to embrace your product or service. They’re far

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beyond the need to rationalize their choices. Be broad and positive in your presentation of information, and remember that resilient brains do not respond—or perhaps even notice—scare tactics like “last chance to buy” sales techniques.

Broader Attention Spans

While an older brain may fall short in certain memory skills, including “
TOT
”

or “tip-of-the-tongue” access to names and words, it excels in other areas of memory.

Studies suggest that older adults may have broader attention spans than their younger peers, so they can ultimately absorb more about a situation, message, or conversation. This may be another way of saying they have more patience. Their broader attention spans allow them to attend to more subtle and nuanced messages, and to give them the time and consideration they deserve. Once again, this brings us back to
the idea of “wisdom,”
meaning that older adults get more context out of their interactions, and then they combine that context with a greater store of personal experience to increase their ability to decode the situation and assess its relevance.

The flip side of this benefit is that these older adults may not remember the specifics—the TOT or tip-of-the-tongue—aspects of that communication. So they know what the overall message means, they know the context it fits within, yet they might not remember whether the story was about Mary or Terry. Fumbling with these details often wrongfully suggests to older brains that they’re failing, when in fact they’re operating in a broader attention span and in a context of a whole lifetime of experience. In reality, it’s not such a bad thing to find one’s keys in the freezer occasionally—if the trade-off means comprehending more of the big picture of one’s interactions.

The broader attention span of older adults should be a key consideration in constructing messaging or campaigns to reach them. Unlike their younger peers, older adults do
not
require quick flash snippets of material. They are in fact more comfortable with knowing more than the headline, and will recall and put into context messaging that honors their cognitive abilities and their hard-won experience.

TOTs

As mentioned, one of the most frustrating brain changes for older adults is the difficulty in retrieving TOTs or tip-of-the-tongue facts. You’ve seen and

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probably have experienced the phenomenon. You remember the great movie you just watched, but can’t recall the (household) name of its star. Frustrated, you stammer and search, “Tom, Mike, Brad?” before you sheepishly move on.