Most marketers will not be surprised by the research reported at Neuromarketing: Don’t Sell, Seduce! It found that ads using logic to sell affected the brain differently from those that used “non-rational influence” — you know, those ads that just have some kind of beautiful photo and the name of the product. They’re usually for fragrances and other products with uncertain benefits.
The non-rational ads stimulated lower parts of the brain — those areas that make the real decisions.
I’ve never seen a truly non-rational fundraising message. (Though I’ve seen plenty of irrational ones.) I don’t know if it would work. But I’d love to see it tried, as Neuromarketing suggests:
Need to shake up your advertising and boost sales? Run a test of ads that skip the facts and logical persuasion, and instead show imagery of a place and state of mind where your target customer would like to be. Bypass the rational analysis, and appeal directly to your customer’s emotions.
I dare an enterprising nonprofit to try this!
What is the place and state of mind where your donor wants to be? What is a picture of that like?
I’m going to be thinking about this a lot in the next few months.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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