Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Marketing: "Why Don't Ads Work No More?"
Why don't advert in newspapers, yellow pages and even on TV etc work very well any more?
Marketing is all about getting and holding your attention long enough for you to take in the designed message. The problem is that we have a limited amount of attention to give and nowadays there are more and more candidates for this attention. What happens? We ignore more.
George Miller in 1956 determined that we can only consciously hold 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information at a time. Any more than that and you experience overload, you forget or don't even notice information. Have you ever tried to remember a telephone number? You repeat the digits, think you know it and then poof, its gone and all you remember is that it started with a 7!
We now have so many tv stations, radio station, web pages, magazines, etc all plastered with adverts. Our brains have a set of powerful perceptual filters that control what we become aware of. Until I mentioned it, you were not even aware of the feeling of your feet inside your shoes were you? In a few moments you will stop noticing them again. Even though those nerves are continuously sending the signal to your brain, it is not relevant enough for you to give it some of your limited attention credits.
So how do you get your advert to get attention? Well attention is received in one of two ways. It is either given freely or it is taken. Most tradional advertising media try to take it. Newspaper headlines that you can't miss, loud, bright, TV advertisements, all trying to grab your attention and force feed a message before you block them out and move on. The other method is to attract your attention. This is where some of the newer forms of marketing come in, e.g. information based marketing and viral marketing. I'll discuss these two in more detail later.
