Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Rightward Ho!

Today's’ markets have a stronger right brain orientation than younger markets of the past. This is because the majority of adult consumers are now over the age of 40, when mental activity in the right hemisphere of the brain tends to increase. This is a critical factor in creating messages for older markets because the brain’s right hemisphere sees things differently than the left hemisphere does.

The left hemisphere sizes things up in words. It’s the brain’s word processor. The right hemisphere perceives reality in images – in sensory images to be more precise.

The right  brain’s larger role in the formation of perceptions, thoughts and decisions in older minds increases the importance of conveying information through sensory information – sights, sounds, aromas, tastes and touch.

But how does one convey nonvisual sensory information in a print ad? By creating multisensory word pictures. Even though the right brain has only rudimentary word processing skills, it draws on image-associated words to key the formation of sensory images.

For instance, consider onomatopoeia – words that imitate the sounds they represent, such as words like splash, wow, gush, kerplunk and tinkle. Coupling those words to visual images of a dog jumping into a family pool, a kid opening his much hoped for Christmas present, a fire hose, a stone dropped in water, or an antique shop door being opened by a customer all create multisensory word pictures.

For good reason we call attention to the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Standing as abstract representations of reality, words generally are less evocative of emotions than images are. Sensory images are far more effective in this regard. And of course, the stronger the emotional responses generated by a message, the greater attention the message is likely to get.

Generating emotionally strong responses is more critical in older markets than in younger ones because older minds depend more on emotions (gut feelings, a.k.a., intuition) in forming perceptions, thoughts and decisions than younger minds do.

The stronger right brain bias of older consumers also increases their responsiveness to messages conveyed through stories as opposed to declarative statements. Stories generally do a better job of emotionally engaging older minds than  declarative statements do. In fact, older consumers are more likely than younger consumers to ignore a message that simply describes a product with little or no affect.

The rightwards shift in mental activity that is associated with older minds promotes a number of crucial changes in how older people see the world and try to make sense of it. In the next post I will discuss more of these changes and their implications for marketing.  

Why Old Age Is Really Not For Sissies

In the last several posts I have challenged the “hucksters of longevity” as Judith Viorst calls those who purvey “the untruth that no one need fear growing old anymore because science - any day now - is going to fix whatever it is that ails us.”

Viorst makes that statement in a review of Susan Jacoby’s new book, Never Say Die. Jacoby’s book is  a broadside indictment of the legions of marketeers who are trying to cash in on the population  explosion taking place among those 65 and older by connecting the products they hawk to heavily varnished images of old age.

If you are involved in anyway in marketing to people in their 60s and beyond, you may find the reading of this book to be a bit uncomfortable, but you should also find it an enlightening and productive reading experience. It will not an experience that quite squares with the AARP image o aging. Remember, it was AARP that came up with the expression, "30 is the new 50."

Nonsense, says Jacoby, and according to Viorst makes a good case for why AARP is wrong on that account and is not working in older people's best inerest in promoting such a view.

Jacoby exhorts us to grow up and accept aging as it really is, not as some 30-year-old copywriter who is terrified by the idea of turning 40 sees it. I see a lot of advertising directed at older people that I judge as being counterproductive – that is, it will more like repel older consumers than attract them.

Try and imagine life as most 70-year-olds experience it instead of how you would like it to be for you.  You likely have at least five chronic conditions and if you are a woman, a good chance of having a parent you must care for and quite possibly a husband who has needs you must attend to.

You are supposed to be retired but an incredible amount of your time is spent taking your aging parent (or parents!) and maybe your spouse to doctor appointments. Perhaps sitting in a doctor’s waiting room one day you pick a magazine and start thumbing through it. Suddenly you come across an ad for a retirement community. It beckons you with some trite headline like, “Fallen Oak Estates  – retirement as it should be.” You slam the magazine shut in disgust. “What do ‘they’ know about life in the retirement years.”

 If you are in your 30s or even 40s the picture of old age that Jacoby draws probably confirms a bias that you have against old age. But if you’ve read the previous posts on this subject you’ll recall studies I mentioned that revealed people in their 70s reporting a higher incidence of happiness than people in their 30s and 40s did. Is it that people in their 70s tend to be self-delusional?  No, it’s more the case that the gap between what they expect from life and what they get from life tends to be narrower than it is for many younger people.

Jacoby’s book is long makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of old age that is very much in keeping with the great gerontologist Robert Butler’s perspective on aging, as Jacoby’s reviewer Viorst reminds us: Butler said, “I'd love nothing more than to wake up one morning and read a newspaper article announcing a cure for Alzheimer's. But we have to plan for aging as it is - not as it might be if a magic potion appears. . . ."

Read Viorst’s review here.

Buy Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age here.