“Your customer has a wandering mind. How do
you get their attention?”
Psychologist and author, Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his book ‘Coming to Our Senses’ says our society now suffers from a “consistent and a constant state of partial attention.”
Think about it - if you’re at McDonald’s and also speaking on your mobile, are you fully and completely at McDonald’s? If a customer is in Tesco, shopping, but is on their mobile at the same time, are they fully present in the store?
What does this mean for marketing communication?
Well, not only is your customer impatient; he or she also has a roving eye and a wandering mind!
Which, given the bewildering torrent of information that hits them all the time, means your chances of getting noticed just got slimmer.
Your brand, the differentiating entity that used to hold the only key to long-term relationships and future sales, now needs a more pragmatic partner that can help translate perceptions into pounds and pence – customer insight.
How do you get it?
How do you learn enough about your distracted customers to make your ads, websites or brochures do the equivalent of tapping them on the shoulder and saying ‘pay attention please’?
Easy. You listen. You meet with customers one to one or in small groups and you listen to their issues, concerns, aspirations, anxieties.
You make sure your products and your ads reflect and help to fix those customer issues. You carefully check your copy to make sure it’s talking about what your product can do for the customer and not just what it can do.
You count the number of times you say ‘we’ or ‘us’ and compare it to the times you say ‘you’. And if the ‘we’s’ are winning, you rewrite every sentence, every headline until it’s the other way round!
