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A Big Reason Advertising Effectiveness Is Falling That You’ve Probably Never Heard About

You never wake up with quite the same brain you woke up with yesterday. The brain, the theater in which your reality plays out in your mind, is in a constant state of change. This never-ending process began in utero when new neurons formed in your fetal brain at the lightning speed of 250,000 cells a minute.

Ultimately you ended up with about 100 billion neurons. Neurons are very social beings. They connect with and talk with each other via vast numbers of dendrites, root-like structures that form in response to the brain’s experiences. Each neuron has between 5,000 and 50,000 links with other neurons. Incredibly, those neuronal connections exceed in number all the atoms in the universe.

The brain is a complex adaptive system without equal. That term refers to complex systems that are capable of learning and changing in response to experience. From infancy through old age the brain’s number one objective is to promote a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence for its owner. To stay ahead of the curve and keep its owner whole it must constantly change in order to adapt to changing conditions, both internally and externally.

What it takes to secure a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence differs by season of life.  Different measures are required to assure a satisfying life for a teen than required for a toddler. And what it takes to yield a satisfying life for a twentysomething is quite different from what it takes for a newly minted middle-ager.

Many changes in the brain’s structure and operations over time are developmental rather than circumstantial. A critically important category of developmental change that scarcely gets any attention in the marketing community is how we think. Marketers easily see that teens think differently than toddlers do, but few appear to recognize differences between adults of varying ages in their thinking styles.

Question: Who is likelier to have the better mind for detail? A fortysomething who has gained in patience over the years or a twentysomething whose energy and multi-tasking makes him or her seem poorly suited to concentrating on detail?

Answer: The highly energetic twentysomething.

The human brain reaches its peak capacity for parsing reality into fine detail in the twenties. It processes information through differentiated thinking, a term referring to reducing reality to absolute definitions and categorically organizing matters by their defining properties. This is the cognitive foundation of certainty that is commonly heard in the conversations of young adults. Black-and-white certainty is less a matter of experience than commonly claimed and more a matter of how the brain works during the young adult years. This thinking style not well-suited to getting the whole picture, but its ability to get the details can be awesomely impressive.

Differentiated thinking largely accounts for the fact that twentysomethings are disproportionately represented among people making great breakthroughs in science. Isaac Newton was 24 when he invented differential calculus. Einstein published his seminal paper on special relativity at 26. Michael Faraday was only 20 when he laid the foundation for the modern study of electromagnetism and built the world’s first electric motor.  Darwin was in his early twenties as he began developing his first ideas on the evolutionary origins of species.

In very later 20s and early 30s, our thinking processes begin evolving toward a de-differentiated style. We begin to parse reality less in terms of categories and more in terms of relationships. Our ability to see how things are connected to one another gets better. The whole picture becomes more complete.

The fact that great breakthroughs in the humanities are made disproportionately by people in the second half of life is largely due to advancing skills in dedifferentiated thinking. Artists, musicians, philosophers, architects, statesmen, etc., generally reach their peak performance well after their twenties.

Ponder thinking styles in terms of left brain and right brain thinking. Differentiated thinking is strongly dominated by left brain processes involving reason, logic, categorization and quantitative analysis. Dedifferentiated thinking brings more emotional, relational and qualitative input from the right brain into the total thinking process.

The strong left brain bias of the young mind leads toward a worldview that is more deeply rooted in consensus and objective in orientation. In contrast, the older person’s dedifferentiated thinking supports more right brain input leads toward a more subjective worldview that is deeply connected to one’s own experiences.

Whether a person’s preferred thinking style is objectively grounded or subjectively grounded matters a great deal from a marketing perspective: each position represents a different voice. Despite this, however, there is little awareness of this in the marketing community. As a result, marketing messages intended for people over 40 often fail to connect because they are delivered in a more objective voice than a subjective voice.

This is a matter of overarching importance to consumer business companies. The fact that 142 million adults are 40 and older versus 91 million under 40 means the mind of the market today shows a decided bias toward the subjective voice. Failure to reflect this in marketing messages will automatically reduce message effectiveness.

Thus, while everyone blames falling advertising effectiveness on the Internet and on the steady flood of ads consumers see everywhere on daily basis, one of the biggest reasons of all is totally ignored: few marketers are aware of the voice they must speak in to restore effectiveness to market messages.

Next: How the Subjective Voice in Market Messaging Differs from the Objective Voice

 

 

Why Almost Everything You Thought You Knew About Marketing Is Wrong

Whether a marketer should bone up on the brain is passing beyond optional. Not that surveys and focus groups were ever as goof for divining truths about consumers as those conducting them claim, those research methods are now OUT. In marketing matters, neuroscience, along with ethnography, is IN.

Advances in neuroscience over the 25 years I’ve been an avid reader in the subject are astonishing. As I’ve written before, the shift in our views of the human brain and mind are no less epochal than the shift centuries ago from a flat earth to a round earth perspective. Much of what we have believed about how the human mind works has turned out to be as much an illusion as the earth’s flatness is.

Research into the human brain is taking marketing into new dimensions of human behavior that are far beyond the reach of traditional consumer research methods. One of the most intriguing dimensions is the aging brain – a matter of considerable concern to marketers since changes associated with aging begin around the late 30s and early 40s. These changes significantly compromise traditional consumer research methods.

In his illuminating book The Mature Mind psychiatrist and geriatrician Gene Cohen does a splendid job describing in accessible language changes in brain functioning that take place as we age. He uses few five-dollar terms from brain science to get his points across. Importantly, especially for those of us who have left the early years of midlife far behind, Cohen documents how the aging brain is in some important ways a better brain.

In Serving the Ageless Market (McGraw-Hill, 1990), I proposed that some changes in mental functioning associated with age were improperly regarded as handicaps. I proposed that some of these changes were developmental changes that took older minds to higher levels of mental functioning. In The Mature Mind, Dr. Cohen provides new information that supports that idea. In fact, he coined the expression developmental intelligence to stand for that idea.

The idea of developmental intelligence reaching its zenith in the last quarter of life would not be very surprising but for the deep-seated antagonism toward aging our society harbors. That darkly woven bias obscures much of the truth about older minds.

While great breakthroughs in science are most commonly accomplished by people in their 20s, the very best in the humanities has generally flowed from older minds. Twenty-five-year-olds capable of such mental feats as formulating the Special Theory of Relativity are unlikely to produce an equivalent result in philosophy, literature or other branch of the humanities.

We’re seeing far more media attention to aging consumers than we ever had in the past. Corporate America is finally recognizing that overwhelmingly, the greatest number of consumers and the lion’s share of consumer spending is now found in the middle age and older population. What Corporate America has yet to wake up to, however, is the fact that changes in the mind/brain complex that take place in the second half of life make much of what we thought we knew about marketing obsolete.

I'm reminded of the words of Valentine In Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia when reflecting on the scale of change in today's world: The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

In my next post I will review some of the changes that take place in the mind/brain complex that marketers need to know about and accommodate.