From all my years in research and consulting, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing worth sharing. Enduring fundamentals, mostly—yet often overlooked. So, this year, I want to share some snippets for your consideration. I hope they’re helpful.
This week’s thought: Clutter is people’s first impression of marketing.
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Marketing Means More
A Yankelovich survey fielded the year before the turn of the century found that telemarketers were tied with Jerry Springer — the pioneer of trash TV — as the No. 1 thing people did not want to carry into the new millennium. Nothing much has changed over the past quarter-century.
This poor opinion is not limited to telemarketers. People have a beef with every sort of marketing. Because the very nature of marketing is interruption and intrusion. Sometimes it’s as bad as privacy breaches; but even at its least invasive, marketing is always testing the limits.
It is not in the nature of marketers to hold back. Consider virtuoso Atlanta adman Joel Babbit who once lamented the wasted billboard space on the sides of stray dogs. When he ran marketing for the 1996 Olympics, he sparked a global outcry with his plan — ultimately vetoed — to promote the event with a gigantic geosynchronous metallic billboard that would be visible at night to most people around the world. (This idea still circulates.)
Nor is it good marketing to hold back. The quantity of information and data bits vying for attention is growing multiplicatively. While the number of ads consumers are exposed to each day is far short of the fabled 10,000 (yes, I am person zero for that flawed viral figure), digital media and channel proliferation mean more ads than ever. Not to mention more entertainments, more SKUs and more stores. Clutter is the most common experience people have with marketing.
The natural response to more is even more. Which traps marketing in an accelerating feedback loop of proliferation, excess and clutter. Which is the reason that attention is front and center these days as a research and business priority, with major initiatives by trade groups like the ARF, IPA, MRC, IAB and The Attention Council, as well as initiatives from practitioners like Kantar, Dentsu, Infillion, Microsoft, GroupM and Google.
The quandary is that marketers want more and more of what consumers have only so much to give.
Cognitive Capacity Is Fixed
Attention is limited. This is old news, yet it has enduring relevance. The post-WW2 surge of computing spurred a lot of work into the best ways to integrate computers with people. Information theory was an originating idea in the budding field of cognitive psychology (as it butted heads with behavioralist orthodoxy), from which came George Miller’s 1956 paper on the cognitive limits of working memory, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Seven is our real-time cognitive capacity. Computer interfaces must be designed around that, and indeed, everything else as well. The influence of Miller’s paper has been so great that it has its own Wikipedia page.
The related concept of the attention economy — and its corollary elements of overload, scarcity, storage, processing and technology fixes — was first articulated in a 1971 conference panel on computers and communications by Herbert Simon, whose innovative career was recognized with both the Turing and Nobel prizes.
In 1988, educational psychologist John Sweller followed up all this initial work by showing that learning could be improved by reducing the cognitive load involved in problem-solving. Which is to say that people have to throttle their attention to keep from being overwhelmed by overload, and learning protocols must reflect this.
In short, consumers are trying to do less. While marketers are trying to do more. From which comes clutter, people’s first impression of marketing.
The Consumer Gripe Is Clutter
Clutter comes from the mismatch between cognitive capacity and the quantity of information consumers must sort through to find what they want.
Consumers have no gripe with marketing, especially not with ads. Consumers like ads. What they dislike is clutter. Increasingly, though, it can be hard to separate one from the other. Because marketing is part of the clutter, and ads are often the biggest part—the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of our overfull information society. Well before consumers can attend to ads they must deal with clutter.
The shopping journey is a jaunt through clutter. What consumers encounter is clutter — it is their first impression of marketing and their most common marketing experience. Clearing a way through clutter is the process by which consumers can finally pay attention to ads.
This issue is misunderstood, though. Consumer pushback is not about ads. Consumers are not resisting marketing; they are dodging clutter. Consumers like ads. The issue is clutter. Consumers hate clutter.
Consumers are more than happy to invest time in marketing if it’s not wasted time. Clutter is annoying because time spent sorting through it is of no value. Clutter gets in the way of what consumers want.
Marketing Works But Could Work Better
Clutter notwithstanding, advertising—and marketing in general — still works. Consumers need information to make good decisions. Ads continue to sell products, influence pop culture and elect politicians. Marketers keep spending because there is a measurable return on these investments.
As marketers push harder, though, piling more onto more, clutter grows, which raises costs, lowers efficiencies and, most of all, motivates consumers to ratchet up delegation. This has been the dance for decades. But with the smart technologies afoot of late, a tipping point is at hand for delegation.
Marketers make demands on the most precious resource consumers have — time. Marketing doesn’t work unless consumers spend time with it. Time to watch ads. To browse the aisles. To search online. To compare and decide. To review and share.
Technological advances, AI in particular, will eventually enable consumers to opt out of clutter and save time by letting technologies take over shopping, particularly the steps of consideration and evaluation. It is the ultimate delegation and thus a fundamental flip of engagement — meaning that algorithms will become the (perhaps sole) audience for ads. So, the only way to keep consumers engaged directly will be to offer more value for their time, not more clutter.
One of the paradoxes of digital technologies is that people want to spend the time they save with non-digital activities and entertainments. Which is not a rejection of digital. It’s just people using digital to get more of what they want.
That’s the answer for marketers, too—add value to the experience, don’t subtract value by overloading it with more and more marketing. People want more value and less clutter, which has long been their first impression of marketing.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
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