The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (19 page)

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Make it easy for new moms to communicate with you. If she doesn’t like a product or service, make it a joy, not a night-mare, to let you know. She’s avoiding unnecessary confrontations during this life stage. Be on her side at every possible consumer touchpoint.

Her enhanced insula gives her
superior instinct and intuition skills.

Mothers are famous for it and here’s why. If something’s slightly amiss, or there’s trouble brewing, females need to know so they can prepare and act with children and network in tow. She has the instinct to tell if you’re drinking out of the milk carton, fudging on your homework, or embezzling from your company.

Never, ever, try to “pull the wool” over the eyes of a new mom.

Their instincts border on the supernatural. Be honest, humble, authentic, and direct in your every communication with her.

That’s the only way to win a position in her active, multitasking brain.

Highly nurturing mothers are a key to species survival across all species.

Consider the following examples: Sea turtles lay thousands of eggs, with a survival rate of <10 percent. Female elephants endure a costly 22-month pregnancy for a single birth, with a survival rate of ∼87 percent (first year).

But it’s what happens after that costly birth that counts. Each new calf becomes the center of the herd’s activity. If she’s female, she will remain with mother and tribe for all of her 50–70 years. If he’s male, he will stay with his mother until puberty, and then leave the herd for a solitary life, occasionally competing with other males for breeding females, living 50–70 years as well. These precious single births with long childhoods respresent both high individual investments and high individual returns, just like they do for us.

Of course, human mothers also
build networks
to support and bond with their babies. In humans, oxytocin cements human bonds and prompts mothers to nurture and protect. It also hooks pregnant and new mothers into the social world, causing her to crave community, companionship, sisterhood, and, particularly, other experienced mothers. This helps explain the wholehearted acceptance of social networking by moms. Any forum that encourages moms to connect will have great influence over that audience.

Oxytocin also causes new mothers to abandon personal fear and hostility responses to protect their offspring. As reflected by oxytocin levels in new mothers, there is much less “fight or flight” response—less amygdala

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involvement—but a great deal more “rest and recovery” time. Mothers must calm themselves down as threats develop, not rev themselves up, lest they leave a vulnerable child unprotected to join an unworthy fight. Fear centers in Mommy Brains become much less engaged than nonmothers.
Prolactin,

“the parenting hormone,” rises to eight times the normal levels in
new moms.

Show plenty of relaxing, mom-to-baby interactions in ads targeting her. Grooming activities, in particular, still have a powerful hold on the Mommy Brain.

There remains, however,
marked
aggression against intruders. Motherhood is powerful assertiveness training. New ferocity lingers long after children are born. Show that you’re protective of her child, too, by spelling out how your brand, product, service, or store keeps the child’s safety foremost in mind, and the child’s happiness closely behind. For example, one of our close friends drives past two grocery stores to reach one with sanitized shopping carts.

A machine mists and sanitizes each cart, and a gloved store employee hands the cart to shoppers. You will see fuller baby seats in that store than in any others in this small town. The prices didn’t get them there—the “baby first”

action did.

Mothers also excel at
Theory of Mind,
the art of figuring out what someone else is thinking. Reading another person’s feelings from nonverbal cues is a very high-order cognitive skill, and mothers excel at it. As with the Female Brain, allow new mothers to feel empathy toward those who represent your product, brand, or service. Enhance eye contact. Show babies. And present a few less-than-perfect/humorous scenarios (but nothing dangerous, of course).

Enhanced Emotional Intelligence:
Mothers routinely exercise positive emotions, such as love and compassion, more than the general population, and they can summon these emotions more easily. With experience, mothers become masters of empathy, cultivating emotionally-smart techniques like self-restraint, conflict resolution, and reappraisal, or “spin control” to reposition life events in a positive light. Celebrate this delightful new tendency in all of your messaging to new moms. Look on the bright side. It’s not a big deal.

You don’t have to comb the back of your hair. That sweater looks great with a little spit-up!

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Self-Restraint:
exercised by brain’s frontal lobes prevents moms from reacting, smacking, yelling, or abandoning.

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Conflict Resolution:
helps moms repair relationships, helps kids resolve conflicts, keep life moving along.

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Reappraisal or Spin Control:
This “learned optimism” helps moms make the best of things, to look on the bright side. Optimism is a great motivator, and a key part of emotional intelligence.

Mom and Baby as One

Dr. Mike Mezernich points out that breast-feeding is a temporary breakdown of identity between mother and child, which profoundly affects both of their brains. “It’s a heavy dose of empathy and understanding that a male could never experience in the same way,” he says, “a source of how women think about people in the world differently than men.” Repetitive intimate experiences, such as cuddling, feeding, clothing, and changing, are a
crash course
in human reactions
minute-by-minute. Moms learn the language of that person’s changing thoughts better than they may know their own.

The mom–baby game of mimicking each other even has a sound evolutionary basis. Making faces and practicing coos makes you happy. Mirror Neurons are connected to the limbic system via the insula, translating imitation into positive emotion along the way.

Reinforce this feeling that mom and baby are one by showing them together, not apart, interacting with joy and purpose.

Also, play on the Mirror Neuron recruitment of new mommy brains by showing those moments of one-to-one contact: rocking, bathing, soothing, and so on.

Birth of a Mommy

Childbirth forges new neurochemical pathways in the brain that create and reinforce maternal brain circuits, aided by chemical imprinting, and huge increases in oxytocin. This results in a motivated, highly-attentive, aggressively-protective brain. It also forces the new mother to alter responses and priorities.

Learning becomes a high priority because the stakes are high: life and death.

As it expands, the Mommy Brain is
specializing, exaggerating, getting
more detail.
As Dr. Mike Merzenich notes, “Its positive plasticity is really quite stunning. Substantial brain changes contribute to the safety and wellbeing of the child and the mom as the birth experience becomes ‘tattooed’ or overlaid on the Mommy Brain.” Within hours after birth, maternal aggression, strength, and resolve are well-established.

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In her book,
The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter,
Katherine Ellison puts it like this: “Like a human GPS [global positioning system], mommy brain has increased vigilance on all aspects [of mothering], including safety and stability of her nest.” Parts of the brain responsible for focus and concentration become preoccupied with protecting and tracking the newborn.

Dr. Michael Numan, a neuroscientist at Boston College believes that medial preoptic area (MPOA) also becomes much more active in the mother’s brains, following the influx of hormones during pregnancy. As a result, “neurons in the midbrain areas that are important in the feeling of motivation and reward, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus acumbens (NA),”

often called the brain’s pleasure center form a newer, larger “reward circuit that is important in feelings of motivation and reward. These stimulate new mothers in the same way winning the lottery or even using cocaine does. It keeps her coming back to nurture and protect her infant.” So in a very real way, having a baby is like a drug—addictive and mind altering.

Celebrate! The new mom is, in a very real way, a new person. Her baby’s birth is a rebirth for her, too. Revel in that baby love with her. Show pictures of beautiful babies, invite her to share her story and make new friends. Remind her of what a “superhero” she’s become.

The Super Senses of a Mommy Brain

The innate brain wiring of all mammals responds to basic cues, growing fetus, birth, suckling, touch, smell, and frequent skin-to-skin closeness. These forge new neurochemical pathways in the brain that create and reinforce maternal brain circuitry, aided by chemical imprinting, and a
huge
remapping of neural pathways. In human mothers, neurogenesis occurs, “the first example of a body reacting to a physiological phenomenon [creating] new brain cells, which are linked to a new behavior,” according to Samuel Weiss at the University of Calgary.

Major Multitasking Skill Improvement
is perhaps the first improvement noticed. In rats and monkeys, new moms improve basic memory and learning skills, key strength for multitaskers of all species.

In Kinsley and Lambert’s fascinating research, particularly when it comes to shopping-like tasks, like hiding food rewards (Fruit Loops) in different colored purses, Mom monkeys excelled, learning where the most Fruit