Why behavioural science will save you in the Attention Economy.

As we continue to accelerate into the unknown, you will need a different approach to marketing. It starts with understanding humans.

You’re a marketer — and your job is only getting harder. Audiences across all sectors are falling victim to the Attention Economy and their capacity to tolerate marketing content is diminishing. Whether it’s your customers, stakeholder or donors, their ability to judge propositions is likely compromised by content fatigue. How did we get here? More importantly — how will your campaigns survive the challenges of the Attention Economy?

It needs little explanation how the rise of the Internet has brought a new era of content delivery. It delivered the promise of higher speed, better and more abundant rich media. All of which had the potential to radically improve the efficiency and commercial opportunities surrounding the attention marketplace, and for a while it did.

Counter-intuitively, the complexity that organically developed, has now brought the opposite result — an abundance of content with a scarcity of available attention. It is widely accepted that these systems aren’t working as well as they once did, cut-through is harder to achieve and the content marketplace is crowded — very crowded. As a marketer your job is difficult — and this grows with every piece of content published (the irony of this post is not lost on us).

We are living, and working, in the Attention Economy. Our finite amount of attention is now a commodity, where we choose to invest it has never been so important. So, let’s set the scene — what is attention? It can broadly be defined as ‘Focused mental engagement on a particular item or piece of information’. These items come into our awareness, we attend to the information, and then we decide whether or not to act.

That sounds easy enough right? It is when something comes into view. The challenge? Too much is in view.

Our biology hasn’t evolved a great deal in a few generations. This is especially obvious when we consider the exponential growth of our technology. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our capacity to process the 5,000+ pieces of content we witness per day, is woefully lagging.

Many institutions are producing valuable research that predicts the potential effects of technology and content on both our culture and our mental health. A clearly identifiable side-effect of the Attention Economy is ‘Content Fatigue’ — now a well documented phenomena. As a society we have become fatigued by choice. Many individuals exhibit high stress and anxiety levels when sifting meaningful content from the inconsequential. That’s your social feed(s) or your inbox at 9am with twenty unsolicited emails or offers.

The continuing swell of content is only set to increase. As the volume of content grows, available audience attention will continue to diminish. Audiences will undoubtedly become even more selective about where they ‘invest’ their finite attention resources.

Marketers (if they are being honest) are struggling to answer this problem, whilst others continue to perpetuate the problem — cue vicious circle. Gaining an individual’s attention is one thing, creating action or resonating with meaningful content is an entirely different challenge.

Organisations have long professed an understanding of the ‘consumer’, but how can we? Biologically speaking, the human brain is made up of some 100 billion neurons and our consciousness has evolved from an incalculable number of variables and experiences. It is in my opinion that the traditional ‘persona profile’ is no longer enough. Can we really be relying on extrapolations of generalised preferences from a small number of interviews conducted on a different continent?

There is clearly no ‘one’ model of consumer behaviour on which we can base our campaigns, after all, last time we checked we are all individuals. Our preferences and our belief systems perpetually shift with the rapidly shifting social, political, technological and cultural landscape. That seems a big challenge to solve right? Perhaps. At the very least, we can apply different methodologies to succeed in the attention marketplace. (Until the internet breaks or becomes sentient of course.)

As unique as our fingerprints, our personalities are what make us, us. The better we can understand personalities and harness the variable nuances of our individual psychology, the more likely we will find answers to winning in the Attention Economy.

The opportunity to ethically use psychographic data to individualise experiences is now a reality. Sure, machine learning algorithms are placing best-guess content in our feeds, but that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about personality-based marketing.

To this point, the wide-spread execution of personality-based marketing lags behind the science, representing a clear advantage for early(ish) movers. Public controversies, like the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica story, have threatened personality-based marketing’s potential, before it has fully matured. Despite its questionably ethical application, the results serve as compelling real-world evidence to the effectiveness of utilising psychographic data in marketing applications — objectively speaking of course.

Whilst some view personality-targeting as a dark-art, we believe it’s important not to judge a field by its worst actors. There are sound and ethical uses for discovering and processing personality or psychographic data. We use behavioural science to offer our clients an opportunity to better connect with individuals with legitimate propositions. We provide effective and ethical personality-based marketing campaigns for organisations who are competing in the Attention Economy — this represents a significant business advantage.

Our methodology seeks to isolate individual traits to communicate with. We then introduce contextual stimulus that attracts greater attention, cognitive recall and positive action.

We’re experienced creators of digital and content experiences that align to individual personalities. Using transparent input models, we create ethical campaigns at scale that speak to both a prospects conscious and non-conscious mind.

Working with forward-thinking marketers is what we do. Together we embrace ways to forge new experiences, maximise marketing revenue and minimise wastage. Highly performant marketing arrives from a combination of behavioural science, technology and creativity.

It’s at this point, we should start talking.

Learn more about Dark Matter | Marketing Science Lab