Perhaps no point in this article has more importance than the following confirmed fact:
Absent emotional response to a stimulus, a person cannot substantively relate the object of the stimulus to his or her personal interests.
From this fact flows the hemisphere principle of marketing communications:
Lead with the right; Follow with the left.
One might challenge the claim that emotional arousal is essential to engaging customers’ attentions by arguing that price circulars, which only name products and list their sales prices, are devoid of emotional stimuli. However, you only need to recall an instance when you found a favorite wine, an item of wearing apparel, or some component for your computer assembly at a rare, deep discount to see otherwise. The urgency you suddenly felt to go shopping for the item is a signal of emotional arousal. So, even those television ads shouting 0 percent interest rates and $2,000 rebates on cars must trigger emotional responses in customers to be effective.
While emotional arousal is precedent to rational processing, what induces emotional arousal is subject to season-of-life factors. One 18-year-old watching another 18-year-old wearing an Old Navy sweat suit, careening down a hill on a skateboard in a television commercial, can usually be more deeply (emotionally) drawn into the ad than a 48-year-old watching the same commercial. On the other hand, a 48-year-old is far likelier to be drawn into a Princess Cruise Line commercial than an 18-year-old. It is not simply a matter of difference in affluence, but season-of-life differences in lifestyle or experiential aspirations.
In principle, targeting brain hemispheres is easy. Headlines and body copy that deal with facts and reasons may involve more left brain processing unless some attention-getting fact like "50% to 70% off sale" grabs the right brain to signal "This is important; I’ve been wanting a new fall coat, and now’s my chance to get one and save a lot of money." However, a sense of the need for a fall coat may have to be present before the announcement of a deep-discount sale grabs a person’s attention. Because I don’t play computer games, an ad announcing steep discounts for games won’t get my serious attention. On the other hand, a PlayStation 2 television commercial showing a grandpa and his grandson zapping alien spaceships might get my attention because I have six grandsons, all of whom are into computer games. This is not an inconsequential thought because, as noted in an earlier chapter, the grandparent market is exploding. Companies that think their primary market is kids, are missing an opportunity if they ignore grandparents who buy a lot of stuff for grandkids.