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Marketing & Sales to Baby Boomer & Older Consumers - Part 1

by James J. Gilmartin
BIO AND CONTACT INFO

Twelve Recent Brain Research Discoveries Having Relevance to Successful Communications

Introduction
It's only in the last decade that most of the literature has been written on how the brain functions and how we process communications. Because consumer reactions to marketing communications will depend on the manner in which it's processed, an understanding of how the brain processes information can be very useful. Information processing refers to the process by which a stimulus is received, interpreted, stored in memory and later retrieved.

An appreciation of information-processing principles and findings can yield some important lessons for those interested in influencing consumer behavior. Although marketing communications is perhaps the greatest beneficiary of what we know about how people process information, these lessons can be applied to many other areas including personal selling, package design, branding, and training of salespeople.

What follows are recent findings of brain research having relevance to marketing and sales to baby boomer and older consumers. Author David B. Wolfe, a noted expert on Developmental Relationship Marketing contributed much to the findings discussed.

1. There are material differences between males and females in the architecture and functioning of their brains. This often leads to different responses to the same experiences. Females generally make greater use of right brain functions in thinking processes, making them more subject to emotional arousal than males. However, research indicates that in later life, the gap between males and females in emotional sensitivity narrows. Males become more intuitive and depend more than they did earlier in life on emotional reads of a situation to determine if it warrants further attention.

MARKETING IMPLICATION: Logic in product messages generally works better with males than females. However, this doesn't mean qualitative differences in accuracy of perceptions because females generally make more effective use of intuition, a right brain, emotionally based function. However, once a female experiences a favorable insight, she may become as rational in further processing of a matter as a male. It's just that her right brain is a more formidable gatekeeper to the left-brain than male brains generally are.

First published on BankersOnline.com 1/25/02