The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (7 page)

Physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted, you fall into a deep, restora-tive sleep. And a new day dawns.

Same Brain, Different Day

This morning, you wake to the sound of an alarm buzzing. You are warm and comfortable.
Instead of focusing on finding food
to ensure your survival, you examine your refrigerator to see which option has the
fewest
calories.

Rarely—if ever – is the search for sustenance your prime motivator for the day’s activities. But your ancient brain still
feels compelled to hunt, to
achieve,
and so it elevates today’s missions into life-and-death scenarios as it has evolved to handle.

Checking your e-mail, you see that a contract that should have been signed lingers in Legal. Exactly as you did when faced with hunger in the savannah, your anxiety rises, you become tense and hyperalert. Your brain urges you to seek relief.

You grab your cell phone and laptop and begin your commute. Sitting in traffic, your brain feels hunted. Horns blast and your amygdala fires (the part of your brain that responds immediately to stress), your blood pressure rises, and your breath becomes shallow and fast. Messages assault and seduce you without relief. The radio plays. The stock market is down. Your sense of security is shaken again. Irritation grows as other cars attempt to squeeze into your space.

You masterfully outmaneuver and do not allow others to outpace you.

Arriving at work,
you gather your electronic spears,
and walk from the parking deck. Along the way, a group of young men appears, sweating and shaking, demanding money and all of your electronics. Your defensive instincts swing into action. You yell and try to move around the men. Confronted, they are now angry rather than just desperate. Now they want your life, not just your laptop. Your heart pounds and your muscles tremble. Just at that moment, a security guard rounds the corner, and the men flee.

You collapse in relief. But hours, days, and weeks later, your brain replays the event. You dream about it in symbols every night. Your fear is heightened and your safety is threatened. And unlike your earlier self, you do not run or

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fight or walk off the anxiety. Instead, you enter your office and sit. You interact with your colleagues all day, in well-spoken struggles for influence and power.

As your cortisol level rises, this “stress hormone” improves your alertness and
performance.

You are “on your game,” aligning yourself with those who support your goals, scanning for motives of those who might undermine it, eyes on the prize all day long, 100 percent of the time.

When you emerge, night has fallen and blinking signs surround you. Your brain fights to make sense of the many messages hurtling toward it (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2

Times Square. Your brain constantly struggles to make sense of a
flood of messages and images.

Source:
Photo by Bart Penfold

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The Buying Brain

Many are cast aside, irrelevant. Some of the more relevant or novel messages reverberate in your hippocampus to be stored more permanently in your cortex and throughout your brain.

When the brain is exposed to too many messages, or interrupted in its drive to complete a task, it purposefully drives distracting messages or images into the background so that it can focus on the task at hand. The brain can ill afford to attend to each note of the cacophonous barrage it encounters. Frustrated, the brain ignores
all of the messaging,
which has run together to form an irritating diversion. Whenever possible, position your message or product in scenarios without clutter. If clutter is unavoidable in your crowded category, make sure your message, image, package, or product is clean and clear, and uses white space and simple, direct messaging to offer a breath of fresh air to the frustrated brain viewing it.

Arriving home, you turn to one of your three screens (perhaps all of them), and monitor messaging for the rest of the night (read more about multimedia screens in Chapter 14). You fall into a restless sleep, which is essential for your memory to consolidate important information that may help you adapt tomorrow.

Cavewoman in a Car Pool

As you see here in Chapter 3 and in Chapter 5, the brains of men and women are very different. They evolved to serve best the needs of each gender as early human society developed. So, in the service of equality, let us look at how a typical female brain experiences two typical days—100,000 years apart.

Day One

You wake weary with a hungry newborn in your arms. You feed and clean your baby, and then set about finding some food for yourself. You are dangerously thin and very thirsty, the child’s needs stripping you of your stores of fat.

With the child always in tow, you venture out into the area around your dwelling. The other women, adolescent girls, and children of your tribe soon join you. Together, you return to a chaparral where you’ve found tubers and berries before. When the children sleep, one or two women guard and comfort them, while the others continue to gather grains, roots, and occasionally, small rodents or snakes. The women’s band stays close, always on the alert for predators, prepared to stand between danger and the children. Yet they do not attack larger, dangerous animals. As their large prefrontal cortex knows, P1: OTA/XYZ

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such “all or nothing” attacks could leave their infants unguarded, vulnerable, or dead. While they don’t comprehend it, this caution permits them to fulfill their primary evolutionary goal: to procreate successfully.

The band of women and children spend the day gathering food, communicating, and in general supporting each other (but if a person can sneak or lie

—use deception—to gain an advantage that may be beneficial to her survival and genetic fitness, she will). The women tend the sick and use their superior empathic skills to know what they need.
Quickly, they learn to “read”

each other
and the babies of the tribe, who can only communicate with facial expression and eye contact. Without words, successful mothers can tell quickly, within a range of different abilities, if her baby’s cry means hunger, anger, fear, boredom, sleepiness, or irritation. As she nurses the child throughout the day, oxytocin flows through her system, keeping her calm, even slightly sedated, and most certainly deeply, thoroughly devoted.

Women, particularly mothers, are supremely skilled at empathic skills, watching others and knowing what they’re feeling and, often, what they need. The female brain is hard-wired to seek out community and uses this enhanced empathic ability to foster it. When presenting a message, package, product, or store environment to a largely female audience, engage her empathic mind. She engages immediately with faces, particularly when they’re making direct eye contact with her; she reacts positively to women in groups, enjoying a shared activity; and she cannot look away from a baby making eye contact with her.

As the shadows lengthen, the men of the tribe return. One has made a large kill that will provide vital protein and calories for his family. The women celebrate and reward this hunter and they become cautious and timid around the frustrated hunters, careful not to anger these larger, now irritated and aggressive males. At the same time, the women carefully notice which of the men would be a better mate, the more successful hunters, and purposefully associate with them to father their children.

As the small group shares its food of the day and hears the stories of the hunts that provided it, you settle next to your mate, sleeping baby always in your arms.

Same Brain, Different Day

You wake to your alarm and quickly shower and dress. It’s still dark outside, giving you your best chance of completing the day’s first round of duties.

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The Buying Brain

You pack the children’s lunches and their backpacks. You check each of their schedules, sign a permission slip for a field trip, and write a note to remind the nanny that your son has a dentist’s appointment and your daughter has a soccer match. You check the refrigerator and make a list of what’s missing—and what’s available for after-school snacks. You pay your bills before it’s time to wake your sleeping children and speed them on their way. Your brain has evolved to multitask, just as your ancestors did while gathering food, caring for children, and guarding their friends. You are a master of efficiency.

The female brain is designed to multitask.
With many more connections between her right and left hemispheres than a typical male brain, the female brain juggles tasks, emotions, logical input, and to-do lists with ease. So what? Marketers speaking to the female brain should be aware that she is attending to many “mission-critical” tasks as your message makes its way into her consideration. She will pay attention to information that helps make her job easier, and to material that celebrates her individuality and her mastery over the many critically important “little things” she gets done. See Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3

The corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres,
is more developed in the female brain.

Source:
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Each child requires multiple wake-ups and constant reminders to brush, wash, and dress. A wardrobe drama ensues with your daughter, with tears and frustration leading the way from house to car. Your superior empathic skills read her distress and dissolve the problem quickly. You grab your laptop and cell phone and jump behind the wheel, making it almost all the way to school before you remember that it’s your turn to drive car pool today. You turn around, now late and frustrated, to drive by three more houses and endure the disapproving stares of the moms who load their now-tardy kids into your car.

You unload the children at school and head for the freeway. Aggressive drivers edge into your lane, horns blast, and brake lights flash quickly. Your brain senses it’s in a life-and-death situation. Your heart pounds, your anxiety peaks, cortisol floods your system.
Your brain has prepared you
to deal with imminent danger and a probable attack. And it does so twice a day, every day—in every commute.

You go to the office, hurrying in, breathless and late for your first meeting.

As you present to your colleagues, part of your brain is drawn back to your children. Did you remember to pack fruit? Is the runny nose an allergy or the flu?

You hunker down to your work, flying through requests and proposals, your multitasking brain accessing both hemispheres effortlessly. You skip lunch because you’re a little behind. At 2:30 p.m. the nanny calls. She is sick. Your children will be waiting alone at school in 30 minutes. Your brain is now flashing alarm signals to your entire system. The children must be protected.

You pack your bags and leave early, again, to the disparaging expressions of your boss and teammates.

Again, your brain warns you: Ostracism from the group is a dangerous
consequence.

You pile your electronics back into your car and repeat, quickly, the trek home. Constantly monitoring the time, you’re panicked, breathing shallow and fast. At every signal, you urge “Come on! Come on!”