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Human beings are motivated to action for emotional reasons, not practical ones. So if you want people to pick up the phone and say “that’s interesting, tell me more” with greater frequency, then let your advertising communicate with them about the experience of living at your community, and save the floor plans, services and amenities for the sales office.

Think back for a moment to your own personal home buying experiences. Remember how you, and perhaps your spouse, searched for the right place. Looking for the right price, in the right neighborhood, so the kids could go to the right school, and you’d have a reasonable commute to work? Remember how you looked at quite a few homes that met virtually all of these criteria, but you didn’t make an offer on any of them?

Not until you found the one – the one that touched you somehow. The one that you could, for some reason, actually get excited about because there was something about it that you connected with emotionally. You just liked it better than the others. It made you feel better about making that major purchase decision because the idea of living there – what you began to imagine the experience would be like – was appealing.

Why did you go through this process? Because you’re human. And that’s how we human beings tend to make decisions.

Despite our protestations to the contrary, we humans make even the most important decisions of our lives – the house we buy; the spouse we choose – for essentially instinctive, emotional reasons. Of course we gather lots of information that we analyze closely. We make sure we’ve touched all the bases. But until we’ve formed some kind of positive emotional connection with the object of our consideration, we typically don’t make a decision to buy, marry, vote. Or in this case, move. 

But the stronger that connection, the easier it is to say yes. People don’t get emotional about an apartment. They get emotional about the safety and/or the lifestyle moving to that apartment can afford them. Senior living communities need to make sure their communications focus on that emotional payoff, because without an emotional connection, the prospect will never buy.