TALK TO THE BRAIN WITH YOUR MARKETING
To appeal to your prospects’ emotions, you have to appeal to their right brains.

The right brain is said to work 1000 times faster than the left brain. It learns in overviews and in pictures, and it guides the left brain into details.

According to Michael P. Pitek, III of The Performance Group, in his paper “Brain Differences: Creativity and the Right Side of the Brain,”

“The right brain functions in a non-verbal manner and excels in visual, spatial, perceptual, and intuitive information. Processing happens very quickly and the style of processing is nonlinear and nonsequential. The right brain looks at the whole picture and quickly seeks to determine the spatial relationships of all the parts as they relate to the whole. This component of the brain is not concerned with things falling into patterns because of prescribed rules. On the contrary, the right brain seems to flourish dealing with complexity, ambiguity and paradox.”

Great for engaging people, the right brain. Wonderful for the senses, with sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells, and pictures. Fantastic for patterns, metaphors, analogies, role-playing, visualization. Terrible at categorizing, analyzing, placing things in order, and comparing elements. For that, you need the left brain.

The bottom line is that people use both parts of their brains when making buying decisions — it takes both the right (emotional) and left (logical) brains to really seal the deal. Which part of the brain is used when can give marketers clues for the sequence, timing, and key elements of their marketing campaigns. Marketing that leaves out one side of the brain or the other, or presents information in the wrong order, usually leaves prospective customers’ brains without the right information to make a decision.

This means we need to:
a.) Start with emotion, by appealing to customers’ right brains, engaging them,
b.) then add details and logic to help customers’ left brains analyze and justify their choices.

For more interesting brain information, see this excellent article on the rise of the Conceptual Age (right brain) over the Information Age (left brain) from Wired magazine, “Revenge of the Right Brain.” Also check out “The Way our Mind Works” by Vadim Kotelnikov.