Wednesday Wisdom 8/21: Filling in the G_ps Bottom-up and Top Down
How you can take advantage of our innate gap-filling desires to maximize brand engagement and memory
The Great Hack Part II — Comprehension
by Greg Lorenzo
Let’s start with some big news this week. Kiari Kendrell Cephus invested in the FaZe Clan in a partnership “to develop co-branded experiences, content, apparel, and anything else his incredibly creative mind can conceive of,” FaZe Clan president Greg Selkoe said in a statement. Another win for G Fuel! Can you believe it?!
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…No, you probably can’t because you don’t know any of those names off hand and there is no context to decipher their meaning. That first paragraph is so useless to you that you’ve already forgotten about it at this point…so let’s try again:
Cardi B’s Husband, Offset (real name: Kiari Kendrell Cephus) just invested heavily in a major eSports organization, the FaZe Clan, competing with Drake, who invested in rival organization, 100 Thieves. In two years, eSports will become the 2nd most watched sport in the country, behind the NFL, with 84 million viewers, something that G FUEL energy, a major FaZe Clan sponsor, has capitalized on. They have quickly become synonymous with gamer sustenance as the brand approaches $100MM in revenue, with 95% of sales coming from the internet last year. Can you believe it?!
Now it all makes sense…sort of. You understand the people involved, the company and the industry, but you don’t understand how an energy drink company could do so much business through mostly online orders and not have to play the same ground game as the big guys- Red Bull, Coke and Pepsi.
So you dig deeper and start furiously googling “G Fuel” to discover that they were an early adopter of influencer marketing and started sponsoring the gamers and leagues years ago, before it was cool, to build trust and acceptance and propel themselves to prominence as gaming culture exploded…and thus the gaps in your knowledge are filled.
The Importance of Gaps
Over the next 4 weeks we are going to examine how humans process, store and retrieve marketing messages in order to help you making the most of your communications. This week, we start with information processing, and to understand that, we need to talk about gaps. We spend most of our days using our five senses to take in stimuli and fill in the gaps between them to draw conclusions about the world around us and make decisions. This can be as simple as trying to decipher what the note from your doctor says or as complex as solving a crime.
Knowledge Gaps
Who remembers watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and getting visually upset when contestants would flub an “easy” question, causing you to yell at the screen, “How can you not know that?” That was 10–15 years ago, and our knowledge gaps have only grown larger with less centralized information sources and more specialization. Thanks to custom news feeds and entertainment platforms, you can now surround yourself with only the information and content that are relevant to you as a computer algorithm constantly adjusts your suggested next piece of media to maximize your time on each platform. This means we are more of an expert on things we care about and more in the dark about EVERYTHING ELSE. (This Wharton professor believes that 1/3 of the decisions we make are due to the suggestions of the algorithms )
Bottom-up and Top-Down Processing
We fill in gaps in our knowledge in two ways — Bottom-up or Top-Down Processing. We’ll use this basic picture as an example:
Devoid of context, we use Bottom-up Processing — analyzing sensory information as it comes in — to see a 1 and a 3 in close proximity and can assume it is a 13. However, once we put this shape in the vicinity of a sequence of letters or numbers, our brain switches to Top-Down Processing — applying prior knowledge and expectations to fill in the blanks — to either read the shape as a B or a 13, depending on the context:
Graphic designers are taught the GESTALT principles of closure, continuation and proximity, which explain how USA Network can imply an S in their logo without actually writing it. Most of the processing we do is Top-Down because we are conditioned to use context to fill gaps.
Using Gaps to be More Memorable
We are constantly bombarded with stimuli across all senses throughout the day, which can end up as part of our Sensory, Working and/or Long Term memories. We’ll talk more about long-term memories next time. Sensory memory only lasts a couple of seconds, while working memory lasts a few minutes. Think of yourself driving on the highway. You are taking in all of the scenery, street signs and dashboard readings each second, but you are constantly receiving new information, which causes you to forget MOST of the old information you just processed. (except for a few key screenshots, which mysteriously etch themselves into your long-term memory). If each memory lasted longer, it would be like playing a guitar with the damper pedal left on, each note muddying the last until they all blended together into a cacophony of confusion. Forgetting the majority of the stimuli we take in allows us to concentrate on and process important information in our working memory.
Now, think of yourself on that same highway, in an unfamiliar city preparing to exit. As it happens, the city has recently been hit by a hurricane and much of the signage is damaged, creating major gaps in your knowledge of how to get to your destination. While many signs are down, the ones you will remember and feature prominently in your retelling of this story to friends, will be the ones for your exit that you were able to decipher (using sensory memory) into a functional solution (working memory) based on their context. Knowledge gaps create stories, adventures and intrigue as long as they are relevant enough to the audience. But, like the first sentence of the piece, they can also serve to alienate the user if there is nothing familiar about them. (You won’t remember any of the damaged signs you saw on your route that had nothing to do with you.)
As a marketer, you must OWN THE GAPS in two important ways.
Perception
Your customers, even in your core demographic, are all being introduced to your product or service with very different expertise, past experiences and knowledge gaps. That means they are going to process the stimuli of your product differently, based on the context of their knowledge and past experiences. They are going to assume characteristics about taste, quality, audience and function based on your packaging, price and products around you. You need to get ahead of these conclusions and test to make sure the people you care about are interpreting your products correctly. Are your consumers assuming something that isn’t true about your product? Knowing this is vital for your success.
Play With Gaps
Similar to “Bring Back The Hunt”, take advantage of consumers’ love for and need to fill in gaps. Give them unexpected gaps in their knowledge and challenge them to figure out the space between — this can range from unique packaging, to new product naming contests, to secret recipe deciphering. Anything that is a break from the expected, from easy to more challenging gaps to fill in, is vital to keeping consumers engaged and your brand top of mind.
Next Week:
Part 3- Memory — The Journey from Sensory to Long Term
