By K.C. KoKoruz, “The Science of Marketing”
45% of the world thinks with the left side of their brain. 45% of the world thinks with the right side of their brain. Only 10% of the world thinks with both sides equally.
Do you find yourself being drawn to ads that are based on emotion and creativity or do you find yourself wanting to skip around the headlines and pictures and get right to the facts, figures, and costs?
Do you find yourself annoyed by “cute and clever” ads or commercials because they don’t answer your questions?
Do you find yourself bored by “facts and figures” ads or commercials because they simply cut right to point?
The reason that you feel the way that you do is because of how your brain interrupts the information.
People who are left brained tend to favor logic, facts, figures, mathematics, etc. These people are typically lawyers, accountants, doctors, etc.
People who are right brained tend to favor creativity, imagination, intuition, etc. These people are actors, artists, musicians, etc.
The reason that you need to understand how people think is because you need to know how to cater your marketing to cover both types of thinking to reach the largest audience possible. If your marketing is too creative and doesn’t specify your company’s strengths somehow, you will lose your left brained thinkers as possible customers. If you are too statistical in your marketing, your right brained customers won’t find you interesting and will search elsewhere to meet their needs.
In sales, it is imperative that you ask some polite yet probing questions in the beginning to see who you are in front of. If the client is left brained they will most likely have a pre-determined budget and idea of what they want, you need to know to stick to your strengths, track record, and price in order to earn their business. If the client is right brained, they will tell you their dream and want to know every possible thing that you can do to make that dream come true. The more creative you are, the more likely you are to earn their business. Just like reading a crowd while djing you need to read your clients and shift your consultation to appeal to the way that they think in order to secure their business.
In general, the left and right hemispheres of our brain process information in different ways. While we have a natural tendency towards one way of thinking, the two sides of our brain work together in our everyday lives.
The concept of right brain and left brain thinking developed from the research in the late 1960s of an American psychobiologist Roger W Sperry. He discovered that the human brain has two very different ways of thinking. One (the right brain) is visual and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details. The other (the left brain) is verbal and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole. Sperry was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1981.
