I have written multiple posts on how the mind plays games with us. But the same mind, is also a problem when we are trying to sell/market our product to customers.

We are living in such a hyper connected world and our smart phones, smart watches, smart “xxx” make it more difficult for US to sell, because even before our message can flow through and register with the person, she gets another alert/call/email which makes her move away from our message onto that alert and so on.

A lot of these things, were supposed to be tools to help improve our productivity, but in my opinion, they have only helped make our life more complex. With so many alerts coming from so many directions, our brain is always “ON” waiting for the next alert. Today I find myself looking at my iPhone every 30 minutes or so, in case I don’t get a “ping” of some sort. I get anxious and end-up looking at the phone to just ensure that I did not miss anything.

So why is this a problem for the marketer. It makes our life a lot more harder. Since our message may be seen and may be lost in a jiffy or may just be plain ignored. Customers ignore messages of things they don’t need. Now even if they think they need something that you offer, but before they can comprehend your full message and the phone rings or they get an email from their boss, or someone walks into their cabin or a million other things and your message is lost forever.

With a lot of people still working from home, this is an even bigger challenge because there are even more issues to distract a person, other than the regular office issues.

So not only has your message to be hyper targeted, it also needs to be so simple and short that the person who is seeing it gets it immediately before the person’s attention is diverted into another item.

Depending on the medium that you choose, the simple and quick can be relative. For a medium which reaches out to multiple senses, like a television advertisement, you could pack a lot of punch into one small 10s time frame. On the other hand if it’s a medium like email, which can only be read, then you need to think of how much you can pack before someone can lose attention. If its a medium like Twitter then your challenges are determined by the 140 characters.

But not thinking about the psychology of your users, can impact the response to your messaging. My guess is that the attention spans will actually be the currency that you are soon going to be exchanging, by giving something, to ensure that they give you the attention.

What’s your view? Do you also think this issue is impacting the response rates for your messaging? Do let me know in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!