How to dominate the attention economy
Your sales and marketing teams have spent the last quarter carefully planning campaigns for the second half of the year. They settled on a 50% off promotion – how could something so aggressive not drive sales?
Because despite the damage to your bottom-line, you chose an unremarkable promotion. You have been conditioned to compete in an economy driven by currency, but today’s scarcity is not capital. And you needn’t look far for brands falling into this trap over and over again (most recently with Banana Republic). The firms that are thinking about pricing, deals, and inventory are focused on the wrong economy.
Today’s true scarce resource, and the economy that matters most of all, is attention.
Compete for the Scarcest Resource in a Fractured Marketplace
Whether at home, in the office, or out in public, people’s attention is being clawed at and fractured like never before. Commuters listen to podcasts while reading their social feeds on a subway surrounded by display advertising. Consumers at home browse on their laptops while their cable boxes offer thousands of channels and direct mail piles up on counters. And at work, desks are battlegrounds for email, phone calls, banner advertising, and more social networks.
There’s more information than you could ever possibly take in, and even more is added each day.
The attention economy is an expression coined by Michael Goldhaber to describe a unique challenge of modern life. Scarcity is no longer defined by access to capital: it is expressed as our inability to sift signal out from the noise around us. Brands who spend their time obsessing over pricing strategies or sales approaches are missing the point: it is likely your customers will never even hear this information amongst all the other messages competing for their attention.
“Rule #6 of wedding crashing: draw attention to yourself, but on your own terms.”
– Vince Vaughn
Rise Above the Noise by Elevating the Conversation
The process of contributing to the cacophony is simple, and contributes to the competition you face. Any person can run a Facebook ad, set up a simple WordPress website, or establish a Twitter feed. The brands that rise above the rest are not defined by activity: they’re marked by an ability to elevate conversations and engage with people in ways others are not.
Like every other traditional economic issue your business has faced, winning the attention economy requires a strategy that is well thought out, vetted, and that you’re willing to bet your business on. There are three elements to your strategy: capturing, holding, and multiplying attention.
Capture the Market Interest with Bold Strategic Hooks
In the mid-90’s, Oregon alum and Nike founder, Phil Knight made it his personal crusade to ensure the Ducks had a competitive football program. He went to the athletic department and asked what resources they needed to be successful. They asked for better facilities and better training.
Nothing happened. Because those features and benefits don’t matter in a world where no one is paying attention to your school. Plenty of Division 1 schools have amazing weight rooms, just like every retailer has bargain-basement sales. Oregon needed something to stand out and capture attention.
As a result Nike unveiled new uniforms. 512 of them to be exact. Suddenly, everyone wanted to watch the Ducks just to see what kind of space-age suits they would take to the field in. And suddenly, the attention for recruits was there. You need to do the same thing for your brand: give your audience something so tantalizing, so exciting, that they can’t look away. That hook will never be a sale, or a product feature. It will be something bold, something that makes someone say, “I have to see that.”
Hold and Multiply Attention Through Emotional Connection
The trap you use to capture attention won’t close the sale alone. Uniforms get recruiters to visit Oregon, but there real benefits that get them to stay (great locker rooms and scholarships). Dynamic brands that capture attention live in the present, just like a recruiting visit. They capitalize on current trends, and provide their audiences with immediate, tangible value – recognizing that the opportunity for interaction is limited. Andy Warhol did this better than anyone, by co-opting the icons of the present into art he ensured that all eyes would stay on him as long as he kept relevant with this subjects.
The last, most difficult element is getting your audience to multiply the attention you capture. The same fractured landscape that birthed the attention economy means it is simply impossible to buy enough eyeballs. The only way to grow is by having your audience spread what they have seen throughout their own networks. The sharing effect is predicated on connecting emotionally through your content: viewers want to share content that triggers a positive emotional reaction and allows them to be seen as intelligent, funny, persuasive, or relevant.
Unite Your Organization Under a Single Cohesive Narrative
Doing any of these things independently will mark a major improvement over a price-first marketing model. Achieving incredible results requires uniting all three tranches through a single, cohesive narrative that propels your brand forward. Every single thing you do: from customer service calls to website copy to email campaigns must be built around winning attention for your brand, harnessing it, and levering it to attract an ever-wider audience.
The good news is that all people are hard-wired to respond to one thing: stories. Stories are what win and hold people’s attention. And we know through research that there is one kind of story that people are most likely to adopt as their own and spread. Yet even today, many brands still spend more time on discounting models or sales per square foot than they do on their narrative and the power behind it.
Dominate the Attention Economy with a Defined Brand Story
It’s no coincidence that the firms most resistant to change are being left behind by those who understand that the game has fundamentally changed. Savvy brands understand this. If you’re ready to propel your company forward, recognize there is only one resource that is truly scarce in today’s world, and commit to winning the battle for it each day.
The first step? A brand story that elevates you above your competitors and allows you to dominate the attention economy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Building a brand story without heritage requires identifying the experience only your brand can deliver and making that experience so specific and so memorable that it becomes the heritage. The University of Oregon had no championships, no Hall of Fame coaches, and no pedigree to compete with Alabama or Penn State on historical grounds. Rather than try to manufacture a history it did not have, Oregon leaned into the one thing it could own completely: the experience of looking like no other football player on the planet. Over 140 uniform combinations gave recruits something Alabama could never offer regardless of its national championships. The story was not about the past. It was about what it felt like to be a Duck right now, and that feeling was specific enough and shareable enough to transform a program that had done almost nothing but lose for a century into one of college football’s most recognizable brands. Any company without a long history has the same opportunity: define the experience of working with you so precisely that the experience itself becomes the story buyers want to be part of.
The question every brand leader faces at a crossroads is whether the change being demanded represents an evolution of how the purpose gets delivered or a betrayal of the purpose itself. Best Buy evolved when it implemented price matching and in-home advisors. Both changes were expressions of its mission to solve the unmet needs of customers in ways that felt authentic to the brand. Neither required Best Buy to become something fundamentally different. Blockbuster betrayed its purpose when it shut down Total Access under financial pressure. The service was the most authentic expression of the brand’s mission to provide convenient entertainment access that the company had ever built, and shutting it down to protect franchisee margins put short-term financial stability ahead of the customers Blockbuster had promised to serve. The test is straightforward: if the change helps the brand deliver more fully on what it has always promised to its best customers, it is an evolution worth making. If the change requires the brand to stop being what its best customers chose it for in the first place, it is a betrayal that will cost more in the long run than any short-term pressure it relieves.
Learn how a strategic narrative gives your organization a clear North Star for every major decision.
When a brand expands beyond its core story to reach a wider market, it almost always destroys the thing that made it worth choosing in the first place. Hummer is the clearest case study available. The original Hummer carried a story that no other vehicle could touch. It had been proven in the crucible of war, adopted by the military, and made commercially available to civilians who wanted a piece of that power and capability. The experience of ownership was irreplaceable.
When GM acquired the brand and launched the H2 and then the H3, a plastic-accented light truck marketed to suburban families, the brand diluted its story in pursuit of the largest possible market. The buyers who had chosen Hummer for its exclusivity and its military heritage left. The new buyers who came for the mainstream alternative never developed the same loyalty. The brand entered bankruptcy in 2010. The lesson is counterintuitive but consistent across every case study in this article: the narrower and more specific the story, the more powerful the experience it creates, and the more durable the loyalty it produces. Trying to be for everyone is how brands stop being essential to anyone.
