The neuroscience of marketing to an overlooked social segment
For most marketers, the sweetspot for much of their advertising remains young people, says Michael Smith. That’s a bad move.
The oversized baby boom cohort has moved into its golden years, and have arrived there with plenty of disposable income. That’s just basic economics. “Marketers ignore that at their peril,” says Smith, of Nielsen Neurofocus, a speaker at Zoomer Media’s 2nd Select Symposium on Advertising and Aging in Toronto in late May.
“It is becoming more and more important to understand how best to target that demographic,” he says. That could mean surveys, market research and focus groups to try and figure them out. But if you really want to know what they think, don’t ask them. Read their mind. That’s just basic neuromarketing.
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) can be used to measure the brain at a second by second level. “We can dig down and identify the way consumers are responding to individual scenes.” And what that shows is that older brains respond to things differently than younger brains.
Brains change as people get older, says Smith. Some of that is result of disease and degeneration which become more common with age. But there are also more subtle changes that affect how the healthy brain responds to marketing communications.
“There are differences in the ease with which the brain can recall words and memories,” says Smith. “There are changes in the way the brain responds to emotionally loaded information, be that positive or negative.”
There are some obvious steps – think, repetition in ads – for advertisers to make their ads more resonant, says Smith. But marketers need to think about the implications for an older marketplace at a more basic level – like product names. Many new products or online-based services want to come up with names that are unique to stand out online. “But that often results in names that have odd spellings or that may be hard to pronounce and remember,” he says.
Much advertising follows the time-tested format of presenting a problem and then offering a solution with the product. The flaw in that format, says Smith, is that the problem is often presented in a very emotional way and, simply put, older brains don’t react the same way to those messages. “They are less easily frightened or less easily prone to be worried about negative information,” he says. “As a result they pay less attention to that sort of thing and you are less likely to hook them…Where as they respond relatively well to positive information.”
