So that brings us to the next stage of perception, which is the topic of attention. And this is a very, very tough one for marketers, probably one of the biggest challenges that marketers face, believe it or not, is simply to get our attention. So you can take all of the wonderful and clever advertising campaigns in the world. But if people don't pay attention to them, if our brains don't decide for one reason or another, to process that information, all of those efforts are going to be wasted. So marketers have a big challenge. And the reason is that we live in a state of sensory overload.

In other words, we are exposed to far more information than we can process so our brains have to be really, really selective when it comes to which stimuli they're going to pay attention to. So let me ask you a quick question. See if you can take a guess here. How many people Commercial messages is the average us consumer exposed to in a typical day. Think about it for a minute. Think about all the messages that you see all the brand names that you hear or see on the radio, on television in newspapers.

So what do you think? Is it 100 messages a day? Maybe 200? Or do you think it's even more? Do you think it could be 500 messages a day? Well, that was kind of a trick question, because believe it or not, the average adult is exposed to about 3500 pieces of information every single day.

And that number is up dramatically from about 560 per day, just 30 years ago. So think about this today. We consume three times as much information each day as people did in 1960. So this helps to explain, part of the problem that marketers face. Just getting your customers attention is a real challenge today. And it's especially challenging to reach young people.

I see this every day when I walk into a classroom, and I have a group of 19 or 20 year olds, all staring at their phones, it can be kind of a daunting experience and you've probably had similar ones. A large proportion of teens today report that they engage in multitasking, where they process information from more than one medium at a time, as they alternate among their cell phones, TVs and laptops. They do everything but listen to their parents, it seems. Another study looked at what researchers call media snackers Essentially what they found is that so called Digital Natives that is consumers who have grown up living in an online world, switch media venues about 27 times per hour. This is the equivalent of more than 13 times during a standard half hour TV show. So you can certainly imagine that marketers who are trying to get the attention of millennial consumers have quite a tough road ahead.

But that's the way things are today. Welcome to the eyeball economy. The fight for your customers attention, or what some marketers like to refer to as an eyeball economy gets tougher every day. So when the eyeball economy, we're not necessarily just competing for consumers dollars. We are literally competing for their attention. The takeaway here Well, one is to avoid really low long drawn out old school messages, kids just aren't going to process these, they are not going to pay attention to what you have to say.

Instead, you need to provide novelty. And you need to encourage virality. We're going to talk a lot about that in the upcoming modules. What I mean essentially, is that you want to encourage people to share these messages with other people. And that means they have to be really creative and cool or interesting. So when we think about how we can encourage this virality we come back to a very basic and important question, and that is what grabs our attention.

So let's take some time to talk about some of the factors that we know do grab our attention. First of all, the process of perceptual selection means that people attend to only a small portion of the stimuli to which they're exposed. We've already seen that each of us has a Supposed to literally thousands of messages every day. But it's unlikely that you're going to be able to remember many of those. So why is it that you remember some and not others? Well, the reason is that our brains practice what I like to call a psychic economy.

That means that consumers pick and choose among stimuli to avoid being overwhelmed. Again, we've learned to be very, very selective about what we pay attention to, because we literally are unable to pay attention to everything that's out there. So one of the big problems that marketers face is habituation, habituation occurs when we no longer pay attention to a stimulus, simply because it's so familiar. As you could imagine, this is a big problem for many companies who are putting messages out there all the time, and repeating them over and over again at some point this stuff just doesn't really work anymore. So what causes habituation? And how can we avoid it?

Well, one way to avoid the problem of graduation is to focus on intensity. We know that less intense stimuli for example, soft sounds are very dim colors habituate because they have less sensory impact. So the intensity of the stimulus often relates directly to the likelihood that we will pay attention to it. Another factor is discrimination. Simple stimuli habituate because they don't require us to pay a lot of attention to detail. So if we have a very simple logo, for example, that we see over and over again, over time, we're just not going to bother with that anymore, because we can pretty well predict what we're going to see.

Another factor is exposure and we've already talked about that, of course. frequently encountered stimuli habituate as the rate of exposure increases. So, for example, if you run a sale every day, you you can imagine that that's going to habituate pretty quickly. If it's no longer novel, people aren't going to pay attention to it. Another factor that's really, really important is relevance. stimuli that are irrelevant to us, or unimportant habituate because they fail to attract attention.

So, if a topic is not very interesting, or if marketers don't make it interesting, you can guess that people are going to turn off pretty quickly. So what does grab our attention? Let me give you a really short answer to this question. And that is contrast. The short answer is simply contrast. Now, contrast can come in many different forms.

But the general wisdom here is that the stimulus That is different in some way from the stimuli that surrounded is going to be the one that our brains gravitate towards. So how can we create that contrast? One factor is size. So the size of the stimulus itself, in contrast to the competition helps to determine if it will command attention. That can be the size of a font, for example, in a print advertisement, something as simple as that. Another factor is color.

As we've seen, color is a powerful way to draw attention to a product or to give it a distinct identity. But remember, it's the contrast of the color that's important. So in some cases, if everybody is throwing a lot of color into their advertising, think about doing yours in black and white. It's the contrast that's important, not just the intensity or vividness of the color. Here's a great example of a company that has used contrast in color in the real world to create a successful line of products. Black and Decker developed a line of tools it called DeWalt to target the residential construction industry.

So the company colored the new line in yellow instead of black and this made the equipment stand out against the other tools that are out there, which tend to be very dull. Another simple factor that grabs our attention is position, we stand a better chance of noticing stimuli that are in places were more likely to look. Anybody who's in the grocery industry can immediately stand up and attest to the importance of this factor. We know that companies jockey very aggressively for a position on the supermarket shelf. So one study track consumers movements as they scan telephone directories. And the results were very interesting.

First of all, they scan the listings in alphabetical order. And they noticed 93% of the quarter page display ads, but only 26% of the plane listings. So in this study, clearly both position and size played a big role. This is also important in online search. Very important. In fact, sophisticated eye tracking studies clearly show us that most search engine users view only a very limited number of search results.

So when the typical shopper looks at a search page, her eye travels across the top of the search result, returns to the left of the screen, and then travels down to the last item shown on the screen without scrolling. This pattern results In what search engine marketers call the Golden Triangle, and this is the space on the screen, where we are virtually guaranteed to view listing. So what you're seeing here is a heat map that is, this is a map that shows literally where consumers eyeballs in a laboratory setting are looking on a webpage. And you can see very clearly that that red portion in the upper left of the page is the hotspot that is where our eyes automatically start. And so, if you're at the bottom of the page, or even to the right of the page at the top, you're simply not going to get noticed.

Another factor that grabs our attention is novelty. So packages that stand out visually on store shelves have an advantage, especially when the consumer doesn't have a strong preference for brands in the category and if he or she needs to make rapid decisions. Another solution is to put ads in unconventional places where there'll be less competition for our attention. So increasingly, we're seeing ads pop up in all kinds of places where they didn't use to appear, for example, public spaces on sidewalks, and even in restrooms, public restrooms. So whether it's the backs of shopping carts, the walls of tunnels, the floors of sports stadiums, or public restrooms, we see that this is a strategy that's quite effective. Because clearly, these ads are going to grab our attention.

So the simple takeaway here is that contrast is key. Think carefully about the messages you have out there about the packages that you use, about the stores that you design, and on and on, and make sure that they don't just blend into the landscape.