Good, Sound Marketing Advice

Answer by James Gilmartin:

The points made by Wemmers are appropriate. We suggest another step in ther process - how to best communicate the product to targeted markets.

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.

1. Motivations do not originate in the conscious mind.
   The conscious mind is the executive officer that, like a corporate CEO, makes decisions on needs that have been framed at lower levels. Neurologist Richard Restak states in The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own “We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives may be possible.” Adds brain researcher Bernard Baars in, In the Theater of the Brain, “Our inability to report intentions and expectations simply reflect the fact that they are not qualitatively conscious.”
   
   MARKETING IMPLICATION: Answers consumers give researchers about their motivations are often incomplete or off the mark simply because people can only speculate about their motivations at deepest levels of the psyche. Creators of product messages need to become more intimately familiar, than is typical, with the “hidden drivers” of consumers’ behavior that consumers, about which they have little explicit knowledge. These drivers tend to be stage-of-life specific. For example, young people generally have stronger outer-directed motivations relating to social status than older people. Older people’s motivations tend to be qualitatively more experiential and less materialistic than younger people’s motivations.





2. As midlife (40+) approaches, people increasingly draw on right brain functions.
   They begin relying less on left-brain sequential reasoning and more on emotions - aka “gut feelings” or intuition.
   
   MARKETING IMPLICATION: Product messages for people over 35 should have more affect (emotional toning) than product messages for younger people. Under 35, people tend to have a stronger reasoning bias, thus product messages generally should implicitly or explicitly promote concrete reasons for purchase.
   
   
3. Emotion, not reason, is the final arbiter in decision-making.
   Initial responses to information entering the brain are visceral. Changes in body states (e.g., pulse, hormonal flow, saliva flow, body temperature, etc.) generate emotions. When a matter fails to generate emotions, a person will not take action on it.
   
   MARKETING IMPLICATION: A cardinal rule for developing effective product messages is go with the grain of the brain or “Lead with the right; follow with the left.” The only way to get into a person’s conscious mind is via the right brain. Again, sensory images are key to getting into the right brain.





4. Initial determination of information relevance occurs unconsciously.
   When a person sees an ad, the right brain initially determines if the ad has personal relevance. The sequential reasoning processes of the left-brain only go to work on the ad after it has reached consciousness. The right brain conducts a process called information triage to reduce information flow to levels the conscious mind, with limited working memory (RAM) can handle. The primary criterion is relevance to a person’s interests.
   
   MARKETING IMPLICATION: Imagine having a conversation in your office or at a social gathering when you hear your name come up in another conversation not far from you. Your brain was hearing the other conversation all along, but only when your name was mentioned did it see fit to alert your conscious mind to the other conversation. That’s what information triage is about. Creating product messages that survive information triage is the biggest challenge in marketing. It has become fashionable to complain about advertising clutter. However, the clutter problem is in the brain, not on a television screen or in a magazine. When a message has relevance to a person’s interest, the right brain will take note. When we talk about having a “double take,” we acknowledge the right brain’s ability to pick up in a nanosecond something that has relevance to our interests.
   
   Marketing and sales professionals often pay little attention to how the consumer thinks and processes information. Research has shown that the right hemisphere of the brain processes emotional information and the left processes logical information such as product demonstrations. This knowledge can help to avoid blunders that might turn interest into disinterest.
   
   Communications that evoke emotional responses typically produce a high level of processing activity in the right hemisphere. Unfortunately, many communications that draw the viewer, listener or reader into an emotional scene, abruptly or quickly cut to product information. Deep inside the brain, this action causes trouble. The right hemisphere is still highly active making it difficult for the brain to process words (the brain only processes images). In short, the timing can muddle the message.



First published on BankersOnline.com 2/11/02