The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind

Chapter 6. The Boomer Brain Is Buying

At the end of this chapter, you'll know and be able to use the following:

• How age affects the "hard-wiring" of the buying brain

• What strategies work best in targeting consumers over 60

• How the Baby Boom cohort promises to reshape the landscape of marketing

• New learnings that replace "conventional wisdom" with a new view of the over-60 brain in action

Age and gender directly affect the hard wiring of the brain. Background, education, culture, and experience all influence how we think and feel. But, they are learned. Age and gender are not. Since they have a great influence on how the buying brain works, it's important to look at them separately and in detail. We'll look at the older brain (defined for our purposes as 60 plus) here, and the Female Brain in the next chapter.

In all the years of human history before the great changes brought in medicine, nutrition, and hygiene over the last hundred years, most people didn't age—they died. Our society is still "learning" how to deal with what happens to a huge population, and to each individual, as we age. Until recently, studies of brain function, in particular, were focused primarily on disease and dysfunction, not on the natural changes that healthy aging brains undergo. More recently, within the past decade, neuroscience researchers have begun to explore real-time imaging of normal brains at different ages responding to many different kinds of stimuli, including marketing. Learning about these changes ...