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Webclips Marketing CommunicationWebclip 2.1 – Recap on attention
What is attention?
Times Square is a place where advertisers are screaming for attention. They want to break
through clutter. This is an exaggerated example, but in everyday life when consumers watch
TV, when they browse the internet or when they go to their social media, things are not very
different from Times Squares. Advertisers they want to catch consumers’ attention and want
to break through the clutter.
But how to break through the clutter?
It is important that you understand what we mean with attention and why it is so important.
Attention: four key characters:
- Limited à people have limited resources available and they cannot see all the
information at a certain point in time.
- Selective à as a consequence people selectively attend to the most important pieces
of information in the environment.
- Voluntary or involuntary à voluntary when it is important to them. Surprising things
automatically and unintentionally draws attention.
- Attention is a precondition for further processing à only after attention is allocated
to a stimulus, sufficient resources process further information.
As you can see here in this picture, more
attention means more cognitive capacity which
increases the likelihood that people
comprehend and elaborated on a message.
In the context of this course, attention is the first and necessary step for any communication
that take place. An advertisement/banner needs attention before consumers can further
process it and make decisions and judgement about it.
Levels of processing / involvement
The various levels of processing in marketing communication:
1. Pre-attention à little or no capacity required (automatic and unconscious form
processing), when something is salient (a red star flashing up the screen).
2. Focal attention / voluntary attention à when a stimulus is important, more attention
is allocated. When people pay focal attention and here, as well, very little capacity is
required to process.
3. Comprehension à consumers will allocate more cognitive resources to try to
comprehend the message. So modest levels of capacity required.
4. Elaboration à substantial levels of capacity required.
In this flow chart, you can see how the levels of attention (audience involvement) correspond
with the levels of information processing:
1. In the pre-attention phase, when information from a message comes in, information
processing is largely automatic. The features of the message come in via our census
and automatic visual information processing takes place.
1
, 2. Later one, when focal attention is allocated to a message, people zoom in on the
information and try to make sense of what they see or hear.
When we see the logo of Apple, we become aware that this is a picture of an apple.
We relate the logo to perceptual knowledge (à things that we already know)
3. In the comprehension phase, we give meaning.
“Oh, this is the logo of Apple, the brand.”
We relate the logo to the syntactic knowledge.
4. Finally, in the elaboration phase, we come to conceptual analysis and start to
formulate proposition based on what we know.
Apple computers are fast or apple computers are expansive.
Webclip 2.2 – Increasing voluntary and involuntary attention
In this web clip I will discuss some insights into how to attract attention.
Some stimuli attract attention unintentionally and involuntary. Chialdini (from his weapons of
influence) calls this stimuli attracter. attracting the attention can be considered to be an
automatic process. stimuli can also attract attention on a voluntary basis. This is especially the
case when stimuli are more personally relevant. These stimuli are called magnifiers, because
these stimuli increase the magnify the cognitive resources that allocated to the stimulus in
question (the advertisement for example).
This is most of the time an intentional process.
Please note that the forces we will discuss, directly affect the amount of attention and as a
consequence the amount of cognitive resources that consumers will allocate to our
communication. That is attention makes sure that people will further elaborate and behave in
accordance to what we communicate to them.
Increasing involuntary attention
When we talk about involuntary attention, we talk about an unconscious process that causes
an automatic orientating response. Various communication cues can increase an automatic
orientation response. People automatic direct their attention
2
,Four psychological mechanism that can increase involuntary attention to a stimulus:
1. Saliency à original
2. Horizontal centrality à centrally located stimuli
3. Primacy à presented first in the list
4. Picture superiority effect
These stimuli are oftentimes unconscious and unintended attention. These are called
attractors. And these are associated with bottom-up processing à prefers to the way
information processing is build op from the smallest pieces information coming in in a way
and therefore driving information process. From the bottom (the outside world) to our census
(to the top, our memory).
The opposite is top-down processing. This is driven by memory, where your brain applies what
it knows in order to interpret the information.
Saliency
- Salient stimuli
o Prominent
o Novel, unexpected, original à novelty in advertising by using variation can also
prevent boredom and assures that people are more likely do allocated more
involuntary and subsequently voluntary attention.
o Stimuli related to life and death à attractors that are related to life and death,
such as the spider but also with blood. Stimuli related to life, such as sexual
stimuli attract attention because we want to approach these kinds of stimuli.
Threatening stimuli attracts attention because we need to avoid them.
These stimuli:
- Stick out and are hard to ignore
- Lead to mild psychological arousal
- Result in focal attention to the source of stimulation
An example
Consider seeing a spider. This spider will automatically
attract your attention, because it is unexpected and life
threatening.
Related to marketing communication, you can think of
ads with unexpected colors that are prominent and
novel.
Arousal explains the relationship between saliency,
focal attention and elaboration. The Yerkes-dodson law states that
moderate levels of arousal will result in a high level of cognitive
capacity, we allocate a sufficient level of resources to try to
understand the stimuli. If arousal is either too high or too low, there
is very little cognitive
capacity available and people will find it more difficult to process
the communication.
3
, This u-shape implies that stimuli with too high level of arousal, may cause the opposite effect
of elaboration.
Horizontal centrality
Stimuli in the center receive more attention (and are more likely to be chosen). You can check
this with a study of eye-tracking. People look the most at the products in the middle. We tend
as consumers to pay more attention to stimuli that are centered in the middle of the
screen/advertisement/etc.
Primacy
Consumers are more attentive to items that are presented first in a list. In the beginning we
still have a lot of cognitive resources left and given that attention is limited. More attention
goes to the beginning of the list. Later on, we have less resources available. Also, we have
learned that items that presented first are oftentimes the most important. That is a learning
effect.
One major implication is that during commercial breaks, more
attention goes to commercials that are presented first in the break.
But also for internet advertising is this important to take into
account.
This is the heatmap of eye-tracking on Google. The redzones are
where people look most. On a search page, people seem to focus
indeed on the first items in the list and also to the words in the
beginning of the sentence. This phenomen is called:
The golden trial of internet research à especially relevant for SEO
Picture superiority
Picture superiority effect à Pictorial information receives more information than
textual information.
Attention is limited and selective, but what does this mean? Where do people pay
attention to? To the brand, the pictorial, the text?
An eye-tracking study where they asked people to evaluate a number of ads and
they found the following results:
- Pictures attract attention, regardless of the size.
- The bigger the text, the more attention
- The bigger the brand name, the more attention
This is interesting, because pictures regardless of their size attract attention which is
consistent with the superiority effect.
Increasing voluntary attention
Now we are going to talk about ways to increase voluntary attention. These are magnitizers.
Three aspects to take into account:
1. Personal interest and inattentional blindness
2. Self-referencing
3. Proximity
How to increase voluntary attention?
4
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