The mind is a mystery, but that doesn’t mean as marketers we should be in the dark. After all, a hallmark of our success is the impact of our work and the attention it grabs.
Unfortunately, old-school wisdom about marketing is just that. Although I appreciate our predecessors’ work in the artform of advertising as we enter a new digital-driven age, it’s time to capitalize on recent discoveries.
It’s time to put cliché advice behind us. Cliché tactics, informed by behavioral psychology, like repetition, bandwagon, and urgency are not necessarily bad. They’re just not a new way of understanding our work and may not be as relevant today. Not to mention I have some theories of my own.
I wanted to know the best methods of capturing people’s attention and causing them to remember our brands, so I took a journey. And where did that journey start? It started with a newly emerging field.
What is Neuroscience?
It’s crazy to think that our existences come down to a series of electrical patterns zipping across squishy bits of blue matter in our heads. Neuroscience is the study of these patterns and responses using new technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).
The term was only coined in the 1960s by Francis Schmitt, who established the first interdisciplinary group of its kind. A group of neuroscientists from many fields who got together to share and explore their combined knowledge.
Since that point, the field has continued to grow and, like most healthy scientific fields, become highly debated. Some of their experiments confirm what we already know, while others might leave us surprised. So, what can we glean from their discoveries today?
Balance the Familiar with the Complex
Neuroscience has taught us that people want to have a predictable experience. This is critical if you plan on holding your audience’s attention for any amount of time. Of course, this isn’t to say that you’re not allowed to surprise your audience. It’s just the opposite.
Complexity often leads to novelty. Making anything too complex, though, can overwhelm your audience. I’m sure everyone has experienced this, whether it’s an ad that looks too busy or an overdecorated room, it’s a turnoff. However, if you don’t incorporate novelty and complexity, you’re likely to have a very dull result.
So, how do we balance the need for novelty with the desire to set our audience’s mind at ease? We need to use consistent mental models. These models help plant a sense of style in our audience’s mind, but they also feed predictability and allow us to incorporate more complex ideas in a digestible structure.
What does this look like practically? It can be anything from similar groupings of shapes to using the same color scheme. This is an ongoing process that many of us already work into our product, but there may be a way to be more intentional about it. For example, if you are working on a website, consider how you are displaying information. Is it consistent across your other pages? Do you use a consistent number of sections on a page, or are there anomalies?
Ultimately, we all want to be more intentional about our design and creative decisions, and luckily there are more concepts that can help inform our choices.
Take Advantage of Different Pathways of Attention
There are two main pathways of attention, top-down and bottom-up. Top-down attention, also known as voluntary attention, occurs when we decide to interact with something because it’s helping us accomplish a goal.
On the other hand, bottom-up attention pathways are baked into our DNA. If you think about it, our minds are trained to notice movement and change. It’s something that’s helped us survive all those generations in the wild.
To capitalize on these two attention pathways, we must understand our brain’s needs. Then deliver that information in the most concise way possible. For example, if you create an ad, you can use Information Gap to play on the top-down attention method, or if you are writing an article, make sure you understand your reader’s goals.
Another example of incorporating a bottom-up approach in a social media post would involve using animation in the post, either by using a video or GIF, to catch your audience’s eye.
Another example if you are creating a webpage, might involve you developing a call to action that literally jumps off the site.
Stimulate the Senses
Attention operates on all the senses. While you may be limited in a digital environment, there are still plenty of opportunities to illuminate your audience’s imagination.
Many neuroscience studies have looked at attention and measured the brain’s response. Some studies suggest improving dopamine release, whether artificially or using other methods, allows you to improve attention. Additionally, artificially generating this dopamine has been successful for reinforcement learning.
The goal is to help your audience’s brain release the chemicals necessary to make sure that they focus on your message.
There are many ways you can illuminate the imagination of your audience. Try creating something that elicits a specific experience, whether this is imagery that creates a feeling of openness or warmness. Maybe it could be the color palette you choose to use or the actual copy. There are plenty of ways to play on your audience’s senses.
A study also found a correlation between high-impact narratives and oxytocin release in the brain. The study itself shows that narratives indeed impact people, and these narratives affect their behavior.
There is a distinct difference between liking and wanting, and perhaps appealing to someone’s senses can be a way to turn a product from something they like to something they want.
Appeal to People
At the end of the day, you want people to remember your message, and if you’re a brand, it might be challenging to decide to let someone represent that brand. After all, there is no guarantee that a person will stay forever.
However, research conducted by Yoon, Gutchess, Feinberg, and Polk suggests that customers making judgments about people activates a different part of the brain than customers making judgments about a brand. This research suggests that people don’t connect brands as personalities. Ultimately impacting your work if you’re looking to connect people’s ideas of your brand to a specific set of values.
As people, we act based on our values, and our behavior is predetermined. So, influencing someone’s behavior becomes possible when you can work from within. To be sure, it’s a complicated matter, but luckily, neuroscience has something to say about it, and it would seem you should probably consider letting a person represent your brand.
Attention is a Precursor to Memory
There is a difference between types of memory. Declarative memory is propositional and true or false. Declarative memory helps us remember events and ideas; this is what people typically think of as memory. However, there is another form of memory called non-declarative, which is essentially skills and habits. It’s the ability to perform a specific task through practice.
To understand what type of memory you are changing, you first need to define it, and as mentioned earlier, behavior changes need to come from within. That means that your audience will need to remember you or your brand.
Luckily, now you have a strong foundation; the longer you have your audience’s attention, the more likely they are to remember you.
Another trick to help your audience remember you is Priming. This psychological concept simply means influencing someone’s reaction using a particular stimulus. This idea might seem pretty abstract, but it’s relatively practical. Priming happens naturally, but it can also be deliberate. Connect you or your brand to a few different ideas and incorporate those ideas into your messaging. Give your audience a clear picture of how they should behave, and they might internalize your concepts.
Although it’s not always necessary to have your audience in mind when creating something, it’s a good idea if you want that product to be commercially successful, and as marketers, that should be our number one goal.
Common Sense Advice Backed by Neuroscience
Work on the brain has traditionally found a home in many different fields. That study has now found a new home in Cognitive Neuroscience. This allows us to create a new framework for understanding the mind and brings various fields like memory, perception, and action under one roof.
The most important takeaway is remembering that it’s essential to know where you’re asking people to look. There is a lot of potential for us to be more intentional about attention, and I hope you’ve picked up a practical tip that you can implement on your next marketing project.
These are only a few takeaways that I uncovered through my research, and there is plenty more to learn. Neuroscience is an exciting field with many opportunities, but that will have to wait for another article.
- Spence, Charles. “Neuroscience-Inspired Design: From Academic Neuromarketing to Commercially Relevant Research.” Sage Pub, Sage Pub, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1094428116672003.
- “The art of medicine 50 years of neuroscience.” Perspectives, 2015, https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60224-0.pdf
- Posner, Michael. “Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention.” Temporal Attention Lab. 2004, http://www.temporalattentionlab.com/wp-content/uploads/HolroydNieuwenhuisMarsColes.pdf
- Zak P. J. (2015). Why inspiring stories make us react: the neuroscience of narrative. Cerebrum : the Dana forum on brain science, 2015, 2.
- Yoon, C., Gutchess, A. H., Feinberg, F., & Polk, T. A. (2006). A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of neural dissociations between brand and person judgments. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 31-40.
- Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire, Eric R. Kandel, “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory.” 1998, S0896-6273(00)80987-3.pdf (cell.com)