Throughout history, many great minds have stressed the fundamental importance of mindfulness. The Stoics said, "You are what matters to you." The poet Mary Oliver noted that "mindfulness is the beginning of devotion." No matter how you look at it, attention is one of the most valuable possessions.
What determines what to look for? How do marketers use these features?
Although there are many factors at play, the psychology of attention is obvious. What interests you comes from one of two sources.
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First, there is an internal interest and you have a specific goal and you are actively looking for what you want to focus on. Think of inside care as walking into the store with a certain list of items, actively searching for them, and delegating your attention in their direction.
Although important, there is another way: external care. You didn't plan it, but something in the outside world catches your eye. What if you're in love with the store, e.g. B. Free samples, bright lights, or attractive packaging? Your attention is now directed outward.
This is the second form of support that marketing teams use most often.
How is the mind focused?
The world is a complex, detailed and endless flow of data. We cannot and do not want to record everything. Psychologist Timothy Wilson estimates that we can only consciously respond to around 0.0004% of the information available at any given time. To deal with this complexity, your brain naturally prioritizes certain elements of the experience over others. To do this, your brain has to take shortcuts.
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You can think of these connections as automatic external attention movers. The biggest shortcut is contrast. Your external attention is directed to what is different around you. The pink dot in a multitude of other pink dots does not create contrast. But a pink dot on a black background? Very high contrast, so it's very likely to catch your eye.
Contrast is created to maximize the difference between the background, the general environment, and the foreground. At a simple visual level, the brain is predisposed to pay more attention to objects with higher contrast: white vs. black, yellow vs. red, etc.
If everything is quiet, the moving object will attract attention. When everything is in motion, the fixed object detaches. Everything comes in contrast.
How is interest used in marketing?
Getting attention is a fundamental task of marketing psychology, and this is where we see the principle of contrast applied in many different advertising scenarios and tactics. Think of something simple, like a bulletin board. What are you likely to pay attention to? One that looks like any other street sign or one that breaks the mold?
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The latter is an obvious choice, but creating contrast in the consumer world is easier said than done. However, some brands have gone to great lengths to do this. They increase contrast by intentionally tilting the screen 75 degrees to contrast with straightness and measurement standards. In a simple way, brands can surprise consumers, create contrast and, ultimately, capture their attention.
Or think about product packaging. When consumers scan an aisle, where do they usually look? Other things being equal, it is moved to the largest bypass bin. It should be remembered that variance is relative by definition. A single color, pattern, or beam split is not considered "high contrast" per se.
Even if one product is bright neon pink, there's no contrast if everything else on the shelf is the same color. And on a shelf with neon products of bright colors, the "design" of the gray packaging will be the most contrasting, and therefore will attract our attention.
The power of contrast is only evident when the product in question stands out from the rest of the environment.
Modern ideas about interest and consumption.
Certain features of the imagery naturally draw attention: the text in our mother tongue, our faces. These visual stimuli encourage rapid automatic processing, making us more likely to switch our attention.
However, apart from certain inherent traits, it is mainly about variation: our brain adapts to what has changed in the environment or what is different from the rest. Because of their critical importance in the consumer world, savvy brands have harnessed these natural traits of our attention span and have developed a range of marketing materials, from promotional efforts to product packaging, that capitalize on these propensities.
The more aware we are as consumers, the better we can protect this precious resource.
This article also appears on the NeuroScience Of Consumer Psychology blog
