Does Your Marketing Take Selective Attention Into Account?

The process of focusing our attention only on a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals makes crafting effective marketing campaigns even more challenging. Why?

This concept goes back to 1958 when Donald Broadbent proposed the first comprehensive model of selective attention, known as the Filter Theory. He suggested that there is an attentional “bottleneck” that allows only limited information to be processed at a time. According to this model, information is initially filtered based on physical characteristics before semantic processing occurs.

Put another way people often filter out information that isn’t relevant. This happens in order to maintain focus on information that is important or relevant to the task at hand. Marketers must therefore guide users’ attention, prevent them from being overwhelmed or distracted, and help them find relevant information or action.

Translation: Move the recipient of your message to their problem solution with as few distractions as possible.