You and I don’t think alike. No two people do. How we think is as individualistic as our fingerprints.
How we think is influenced by our unique genome, unique life story, our current circumstances, our environment, our worldview and finally, the level of maturation we’ve attained. All in all too many sources of variables for a perfect match between how you think and how I think.
Of course we may be compatible in our respective thinking by virtue of similar orientations. We may both be liberal or conservative, of the same religion and generally in unison on how we approach life. But there will always be differences. In fact how you think is not only different from how I think. It’s is different from how you thought as a child or even 10 years ago.
Henri Bergson observed that, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” You think differently today than you did a year ago because you have creating yourself endlessly.
All of this is by way of laying a foundation for my argument in this post that is a huge cognitive gap exists between a 35-year old copywriter and a 65-year-old consumer. The result is that very little advertising aimed at older people reflects the way they think because the young copywriter sees the world through the lens of – well, a 35-year-old.
This gap can never be fully closed but it can be considerably if the 35-year-old makes it his or her business to learn as much as they can about how a 65-year old thinks.
I mentioned in my last post about how as we age we tend o experience an increase in right brain participation in our mental functions. The right brain is as different from the left brain in how it sees and makes sense of life as you and may be in our how we think.
Roger Sperry won the Nobel prize for his study of patients whose right and left hemispheres have been surgically separated to inhibit life threatening grand mal seizures. After a number of experiments he concluded “… both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”
It would seem then that increased activity in the right brain in later life would result in changes in worldviews, values and what people expect from life. It also appears likely that a different style of communications is needed to connect with the right brain than the style that best connects with the left brain.
More specifically, the mechanistic, analytic reasoning left brain wants facts and prefers them in clear, unambiguous terms. The emotional, intuitive right brain is less interested in details than in the total picture. The left brain sees things in terms of categories; the right brain in terms of relationships.
Stories. Stories. Stories. The right brain loves stories. The left brain couldn’t care less – in fact in its impatience to get to the point directly and fast, stories are bothersome. On the other hand the right brain turns a deaf ear to declartive statements filled with facts and product claims.
The right brain also likes metaphor s – images of one thing that remind one of something else. It helps the right brain’s comprehension of a matter or brings the matter home more vividly. This overcomes the right brain’s very limited language abilities – you know – a picture is worth a thousand words to the right brain literally. It’s important to know, however, that the left brain, endowed with powerful language skills, is unable to decipher metaphors.
So the lesson in all of this is that as the older brain moves to the right, the marketer must also do so in how he or she develops communications for older markets.