2: Attention May Not Matter As Much As You Think
For marketing, attention is very important topic. It is the first step in the AIDA process and a prerequisite to the marketing process - it doesn't matter what you say to a person who isn't paying attention. In this present world of media saturation, it's also important to "break through the clutter" of advertising to be the one message among dozens that gets attention. And there's also talk of the "distracted customer" who is too busy doing more important things to pay attention to advertising.
But the author suggests it may not be as important as we thought to have the undivided and focused attention of a prospective customer - there are other kinds of attention. Even when the mind is intently focused on something, it is not entirely oblivious to anything else. . A person's senses are constantly bombarded with information, and while there is sole ability to intentionally focus on one thing and ignore everything else - the truth is that 'everything else" is not ignored by the mind, it is simply recognized as unimportant most of the time.
It is the unconscious part of the mind that decides whether a given stimulus deserves our full and conscious attention - but it must be aware of something in order to decide whether to ignore or focus upon it. This stems from a survival instinct that draws attention to an immediate threat and causes us to give attention to it - the antelope who is intently searching for something to graze on is instantly aware of motion in the high grass. If we were not aware of our environment at all times, we would not have survived as a species.
It's also suggested that most of what we experience is gained through "latent attention." Since we can only focus the mind on one thing, we experience hundreds of other things on the periphery of consciousness. He mentions the example of driving on a highway - we're paying attention to the traffic, but we are seeing dozens or hundreds of billboards. We do not give them attention, but if prompted we find that we remembered a significant number of them.
So it may be sufficient to capitalize upon this latent attention - which is to say that we do not need to continuous and focused attention in order to communicate information to the customer. In fact, it may be more fruitful to leverage latent attention, because people tend to think critically about the things that they are focused upon, but passively absorb things that are noticed on the periphery.
That is, a person who is watching a commercial for a product is well aware that they are receiving a message that is crafted to get them to purchase the product. They are distrustful of advertisements, and are paying close attention to determine whether they are being deceived. But when a radio advertisement is heard in the background, the person is not giving it much attention, and the connection between the product and its value is not scrutinized. The next time they feel hungry, they crave a certain brand - they are not aware of having been "sold" on it because they weren't paying attention. And it's suggested that this is the way most "brand learning" takes place.
Traditional marketers put most of their effort into creating messages that are effective if the audience gives it their full attention - and likely this is not the best approach because people are averse to advertising. When a television advertisement comes on, people stop paying attention to the screen, chat among themselves, leave the room, etc. They are still hearing and sometimes even seeing the screen, but it is not getting their attention. So they lose the full message, but the general gist, the tone, and bits and pieces of the ad remain in memory.
(EN: There was a separate study that investigated what happens when people fast-forward through commercials on their VCR and DVR - and the results were surprising in the recollections people had. They were able to name brands, associate brands to products, and name some of the images associated to the brands. This is because a person who is fast-forwarding through commercials is giving attention to the screen to look for cues that the program is about to resume, and as such they are paying attention to the fast-forwarded advertising.)
Peripheral attention leads to "implicit learning," which is also an instinctive behavior. It is the way that we learn to navigate the world. The tribal hunter who is pursuing game and paying close attention to the tracks of the herd would not be able to find the way home if he didn't notice the landmarks he passed, learn which way to turn, all of which is done without paying attention or trying to memorize the landscape.
And memory is significant - as this is the basis of learning things. We "learn" information by storing it in memory, and we apply learning by accessing memories. When we are consciously trying to learn things, we use the rote method of ruminating over them to store them in memory - but we also unconsciously learn things because the things we receive as sense-data, even if we are not paying attention, are stored and categorized in memory for later retrieval. That is, we have "implicit memories" of things we sensed but weren't focusing on, and the ability to leverage and make connections to that information.
Implicit learning is also powerful in that we have the tendency to defend what is known against any new suggestion. So when we connect a brand to a quality, it is difficult for a competing brand to own that quality or suggest the original brand does not possess the quality we believe it to have. So a person who absorbed without considering and learned without focusing then defends these beliefs against conscious attempts to dismiss them.
Within the past fifty years or so, brands have infiltrated everyday life - in any setting, even in the home, a person can see many brands at a glance. Every product is obsequiously labeled or marked with brands: every car you see on the road declares its brand, every product in your refrigerator has its brand on the label, as you watch a television or a computer screen the brand is visible on the edge of the screen. There is hardly a manufactured object in any environment that does not display its brand.
The net effect of this is that brands are constantly attempting to burrow into our brains without our realizing it. We associate a brand to the product on which it is emblazoned, and associate the qualities of the experience of that item to the brand. So as we go about our daily lives paying conscious attention to the few things that matter, we are unconsciously noticing many other things that are being stored in our memory, and we develop beliefs about a brand that we accept without deliberation and will defend against challenges.
He attempts to wrap back to the idea of brand fantasy, which is supported (or not) by the context in which we encounter a product. From our basic perceptions we associate brand to product, but associating it to more abstract and emotional qualities depends on the context in which the brand was encountered.
The author acknowledges the Vicary "experiment" as the reason many have been dismissive of "subliminal messaging," which caused quite a stir before it was revealed to be a hoax. But the fact that this incident was a trick does not disprove that information enters the mind without our awareness, merely that this particular method is not an effective way to do it.
He then turns to the topic of metacommunication, which includes qualities of a message rather than its substance. In verbal communication, a person's tone of voice delivers additional information and sometimes contradicts the literal meaning of the words he is saying. In printed communication, things such as the typeface, color, and layout of an advertising communicate to the recipient. We may not consider a candidate because his resume is printed on cheap paper, or reject a sales promotion from a financial advisor whose brochure uses bright colors and a whimsical font. Sometimes, we are aware of the reason that a message doesn't seem credible - but in many instances it is an unconscious decision.
He then considers advertising to the unconscious. For example, many people will pay attention to a funny commercial but will not consciously remember what brand was being advertised. It is often assumed that this is a blunder, and that the advertiser has wasted money - but what is found is that people develop associations to the brand even though they cannot make the conscious connection. That is, they associate the pleasure they felt with the brand, and come away with the impression that it is a "fun" or "friendly" brand without realizing it was the commercial that caused them to make that connection.
He then speaks of inattention blindness - how a person whose mind is occupied with something tends not to notice other things. He mentions a specific experiment in which subjects are instructed to count the number of times people in a video pass a ball to one another - during the video one of the people is replaced with a gorilla, and it's asserted that about half the people who watch the film don't even notice that. It's in the same way that a stage magician misdirects the attention of his audience so they do not see him slip something out of his sleeve or hide something in a pocket. He suggests that marketers can do the same thing to attract attention away from the flaws and drawbacks with its product.
(EN: He does not explain how he reconciles the obvious conflict with these ideas - either unconscious messaging works because we notice things outside our focus or misdirection works because we don't notice them.)