Why Your Marketing Gets tRAShed

We’d like to think that our company, our brand, our message, is as big in the minds of our customers as it is in ours.

Aren’t we that important – I mean, we are the center of everyone else’s universe, right??

Not a chance.

If, through all the noise surrounding your audience, if you even manage to get into someone’s mind, you might get one pixel of memory space. One.

And this is the marketer’s challenge. It’s not, “how many millions of eyeballs can I reach?,” but rather, “how can I embed a compelling message into the minds of those who need what I have to offer?”

During the Super Bowl, advertisers spent millions trying to break through the noise (often using novelty) in order to somehow get attention and memory space. There was a lot of noise to filter out for viewers! But, ultimately, if what is being peddled doesn’t matter to me, the message gets deleted from my mind.

And that’s why embedding your message is actually challenge #2. Challenge #1 is this – you have to actually matter.

You see, the brain stem has this brilliant filter called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). One of the functions of the RAS is to filter for relevance and novelty. The way we cope with the endless flood of impulses pouring into our brains is to filter out whatever seems irrelevant or unimportantly familiar. Just to get into the brain of our audience, we must successfully compete with a vast array of other stimuli demanding attention.

If you don’t matter, you don’t make it into the brain matter. Pure and simple. You’re tRAShed.

And even if you do pass the RAS, you’re going to get ONE hook to hang your message on. You don’t get to fill a mental blackboard with a jumble of bullet points.

How’s your messaging? Are you RAS-ready?

Relevance and succinct clarity. That’s your pathway in. One vivid, memorable message that matters. To the people that matter to you.

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Original brain photo credit: _DJ_ via photopin cc. RAS original clip art provenance unknown.