Attention in Marketing: What Matters Most?
Why are you posting on social media?
For attention.
And that makes sense.
There’s both a strategic and psychological advantage to earning someone’s attention. Attention is an act of focused giving: for a few seconds, someone may choose your message over everything else competing for them. And without it, your message—whatever it may be—evaporates without impact.
So, yeah: go after attention.
But there’s a catch.
Attention requires exposure
You can’t have attention without exposure first.
My apologies, Bill.
Posting creates the opportunity for exposure. It gets you into the environment. It gives someone the chance to encounter your idea.
But exposure is weak on its own. Because we’re exposed to more stimuli every day than we can consciously process. And most of it disappears.
So show up. But that’s only the first step.
This makes the job twofold:
- Create exposure. Show up regularly. Repeatedly. Consistently.
- Convert exposure into attention. Give people a reason to stop.
How?
Novelty. Relevance. Unexpectedness. Contrast. Or—to risk sounding like a textbook—emotional salience.
But there’s one more step.
Attention is the bridge
For any audience, the question becomes: “You have my attention, but what does it mean for me?” Unanswered, attention then isn’t much better than exposure.
So help your audience interpret what this means.
And this last step matters. Because whether you help them or not, they will decide what your message means to them.
Irrelevance is an interpretation and it’s one of the worst.
So while attention may be your objective, it isn’t the goal.
Instead of asking only:
How do I get people to pay attention?
Ask:
What happens once I have it?
The best communication moves someone through all three stages:
Expose → attract attention → create meaning.
Or, even simpler:
Show up. Make them stop. And give something that matters.
What matters is mattering. And isn’t that what we’re all really trying to do?
The above is based on the exposure → attention → interpretation framework in Michael R. Solomon and Cristel A. Russell’s Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being. Find it here: Pearson — Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being
