Introducing “The Horror Movie Strategy” to make your marketing succeed
Picture this: You’re at a crowded bar. You hear the slosh of drinks being poured, the live band playing loudly on stage, the raucous din of the crowd’s response. Suddenly, through this cacophony, you hear your name, at normal speaking volume, clear as day.
Sit down, grab a drink, and listen up. I have a story for you. Well, the listening part is actually contingent on a few factors.
The Cocktail Party Effect occurs, in its most literal sense, at a party, where you’re paying attention to what the person speaking to you is saying, and filtering out all the other noise. This cognitive ability leaps a surprising number of barriers — a study of air traffic controllers and pilots found it can vary based on the gender of the speaker, the direction the sound emanates from, the rate of speech, and more, but typically succeeds. Not everything can earn your selective attention, and that changes based on your focus and level of development. Check out this quick chart I made detailing how your selective attention changes as you grow:
The effect also occurs when you pick out an important word through all the racket, like when out of the blue someone says your name and you somehow notice. One key point here is that taboo words and names draw the greatest attention and have the highest potential for disruption of the existing conversation. They also have little meaning to babies and kids; hence, don’t invite them to your cocktail gatherings. One reason the “Share a Coke” campaign proved so successful is that names have the power to cut through the noise around us and immediately grab our attention, a survival mechanism that Coke hijacked to spark viral user-generated content and great sales numbers. So, how can you start turning heads with your marketing strategy?
Diving into one more theory — Anne Triesman’s Attenuation Model shows that when we hear several stimuli, we don’t only hear one channel, but simply reduce emphasis on the background sounds. Therefore, while we’re only consciously aware of the preferred stimulus, the background noise is heard, but filtered out prior to evaluation.
However, when researchers paired a stimulus word with a mild shock, and later embedded that phrase with the background noise during another conversation, participant arousal (measured though electrodes on the skin) spiked when they heard the phrase the second time, even though people weren’t actively aware of it. This brings in my proposal, which I’d title The Horror Movie Strategy. I chose this title because horror movies typically open with frightening scenes, which keep the viewer engaged as the story shifts to a slower build up of tension, ultimately ending with a big burst of excitement and nerve-settling conclusion. This technique aims to do something similar.
Here’s how it works for your brand in practice.
- Pair a distinct visual element of your brand with a highly arousing stimulus — this could be a jarring sound, a chorus of voices, a pop-up sensory product sample, or a narrator speaking directly to a named viewer (I’d aim for popular names here.)
- Follow up with the key message you want to drive home. This should be the pieces critical to your brand’s product or service. You only have the audience’s attention for a limited time.
- Close by incorporating your visual element into the the key message as you close. This helps resolve that earlier arousal instilled in the audience with the message — and resolving that uncertainty is key to helping form memory.
The Horror Movie Strategy is designed to piggyback on the best elements of the Cocktail Party Effect, cutting through the distractions to remain memorable, even at an unconscious level. Additionally, based on the underlying logic of the Attenuation Model, your brand’s cues will make an impression - even if consumers can’t immediately recall your product, the stimuli won’t go unnoticed. Viewers in a state of heightened emotional arousal are keen listeners — any information could be crucial to their survival. You may not remember the plot of every scary movie you watch, but the key axioms — stakes kill vampires, silver bullets kill werewolves, water melts green witches — stick with you because they resolve the fear and arousal.
An example from Gerald Zaltman’s Unlocked demonstrates the logic of this approach with a quick hypothetical. Imagine you watch three videos of a tightrope walker crossing a river — and the video cuts out 7 seconds before it’s over. Which one would you choose to see the end of?
Video A: The tightrope walker is confident, and walks confidently across most of the wire.
Video B: The tightrope walker struggles from the outset, and is about to plunge in.
Video C: The tightrope walker wobbles throughout the video, fighting to stay balanced.
Most people choose Video C, and feel disappointed or angry if only Video A is available. Why? Because discomfort and uncertainty demand resolution in our minds, especially when someone is in danger.
I’m not saying your brand needs to feature a risky stunt or activity, but think of the successful efforts of Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World, the Melbourne Metro’s Dumb Ways to Die campaign, or Red Bull’s Stratos Jump. Other than containing highly arousing stimuli, they were all named in Ad Age’s 15 Best Campaigns of the 21st Century. These articles all cut through through the noise using the Horror Movie Strategy— capturing audience attention through dramatic means — death, swashbuckling adventure, extreme risk — and then relaying their brand message while viewers were rapt on the edge of their seats. Call it a horror movie strategy, an attenuation experiment IRL, or whatever you want. Just don’t call it forgettable.
Hannibal Brooks is a Senior Insight Associate at Olson Zaltman.
