The Psychology Of How Marketing Captures Our Attention
Many great minds throughout history have emphasized the importance of mindfulness. "You pay attention," said the Stoics. Poet Mary Oliver said that "vigilance is the beginning of devotion." Regardless, attention is one of the most valuable assets.
What determines what you pay attention to? And how do marketers use this feature?
Although many factors play a role, the psychology of attention is clear. What you see comes from one of two sources.
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First, there is endogenous focus, you have a specific goal and you are actively looking for what you want to focus on. Think of endogenous attention as if you went to a store with a specific list of items, actively looking for them and committing your attention to them.
But above all, there is another form: exogenous attention. You didn't expect it, but something outside caught your attention. If your store is interested in free samples, bright lights or attractive packaging, for example? Your attention is now directed exogenously.
It is this second form of attention that marketing teams use most.
How the mind is focused
The world is a complex, detailed and endless stream of information. We can't have it all, and we don't want to. Psychologist Timothy Wilson has estimated that we can only consciously perceive about 0.0004% of the information available to us at any given time. To cope with this complexity, your brain naturally prioritizes certain elements of an experience over others. To do this, your brain has to cut corners.
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You can think of this shortcut as an automatic exogenous attention trigger. And the biggest shortcut is contrast. Your exogenous attention is focused on different things around you. A pink dot in a large group of other pink dots creates no contrast. What about a pink dot on a black background? Very high contrast, so it will probably catch your eye.
Creating contrast is about maximizing the differences between the background, the general environment, and the foreground. At a simple visual level, the brain is biased to pay more attention to high-contrast objects: black vs. white, red vs. yellow, etc.
If everything is static, moving objects will attract attention. If everything moves, static objects stand out. Everything became a contrast.
How attention is used in marketing
Attracting attention is an important task in marketing psychology, and here we see the principle of contrast as it relates to different scenarios and promotional tactics. Think of something as simple as a billboard. What will you focus on the most? One that resembles or breaks the pattern of all the other signs on the road?
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The latter was the obvious choice, but creating a contrast in the consumer world is easier said than done. However, some brands have gone to great lengths to do so; they encourage contrast by deliberately tilting the table 75 degrees, choosing between standards of fairness and simplicity. Simply put, brands can surprise consumers, create contrast, and ultimately capture their attention.
Or think about product packaging. Where do consumers' eyes naturally fall as they walk the aisles? All other things being equal, they will gravitate toward the most conflicting pack. Note that contrast is relative by definition. A unique color, design, or packaging difference is not inherently "high contrast."
Even if one product is bright neon pink, there is no contrast when everything on the shelf is the same color. And on a shelf of brightly colored fluorescent products, the gray "design" of the packaging will be the most contrasting and therefore attract our attention more.
The power of contrast only emerges when the product in question stands out from the rest of the environment.
Recent Thoughts on Mindfulness and Consumption
Certain features of the visual world naturally attract attention: texts in our native language and on our faces. These visual stimuli trigger rapid automatic processing and thus distract us.
But apart from relatively few intrinsic features, the focus is mainly on contrast: our brains tune in to what changes or is different from others in the environment. Given its central importance in the consumer world, savvy brands have taken advantage of this natural quality of our attention and developed a range of marketing materials that capitalize on this human tendency – from promotional tactics to product packaging.
The more informed we as consumers are, the more we can protect this precious resource.
This article also appears on the NeuroScience Of Consumer Psychology blog
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