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As marketers, we are all fighting for the same limited number of human attention spans and eyeballs. But as we try to find more ways to get those coveted moments of people’s time, clicks or likes, we often resort to increasingly “daring” copy, images or messages.
But what if the best way to grab a reader’s attention isn’t to bombard their senses, but to create simple, evocative messages that inspire them to learn more about your organization or product?
The best way to do this is to meet your audience where they’re at. To explore this concept, let’s look at a field that understands working with people on their own terms better than any other: human-factors engineering.
Bending Over Backward
Human-factors engineering — better known as “ergonomics” — is the application of psychological and physiological principals to product, process and systems design. In short, it’s the study of designing tools and systems to fit the human body and cognitive abilities rather than forcing humans to adapt to these things.
When ergonomics was first studied during the industrial revolution, the emphasis was simply on increasing productivity and making tools safe for workers to use, with little attempt at personalization. This can be compared to the first stages of marketing, when the goal was simply to get content in front of potential consumers, with no way to target or personalize ads. If consumers were watching TV at a certain time, listening to the radio, or driving past a billboard, they saw the same ads everyone else did, whether or not they were a likely buyer. This resulted in some iconic campaigns, but there was little conscious effort to understand why a particular campaign worked (or didn’t), nor was there any reliable way to measure success other than hit-or-miss surveys or simply tracking overall business performance.
The next era of human-factors design focused on understanding human cognition and how people learn, make decisions and react to stimuli. During and after World War II, for example, as aircraft became more complex, engineers turned their attention to the innate capabilities of the human visual system when designing aircraft controls and displays. This is also the era when forward-thinking leaders and designers, such as Elias Porter and Alphonse Chapanis, began theorizing that organizational systems are complete organisms and that workers should be treated as trainable resources instead of disposable ones.
This corresponds to the era in marketing during the rise of the commercial internet when companies began to focus on optimizing the performance of digital properties and digital campaigns. Marketers began turning to neuroscience in order to better understand how they could stand out from the increasing levels of digital noise and influence buyer behavior. During this period, we also witnessed the emergence of user experience design as a discipline, bringing a new level of rigor to web design and digital design more generally.
Which brings us to the present. We have now reached a critical mass when it comes to sensory overload in digital marketing, with research suggesting that consumers are exposed to more than 5,000 ads a day. Given this deluge, marketers have come to realize that standing out has become about more than just cognitive tricks that anyone can use.
In the realm of ergonomics, Professor James Intriligator, who heads the Human Factors Engineering program at Tufts University, says that we are now moving into a new phase of human-factors design focused not on physical or cognitive factors, but emotional factors. Marketers must take a lesson from this and recognize that, in a crowded, loud digital landscape, the best differentiator is content aimed at making audiences feel.
Emotions: The Secret Sauce
The new challenge involves elevating your marketing through evocative content. Images, stories and other assets that cause viewers to feel a sense of nostalgia, anxiety or thirst for adventure have an advantage in the unending competition for our attention. In other words, what stands out today is emotional content.
Whether your organization relies on written content to tell compelling stories, captivating images to transport the reader to a different time or place, or video to inspire and uplift your audience, your goal in 2020 must be the creation of a real emotional connection to your brand.
The B2B world, on the other hand, with its functional focus, has been slow to adopt this trend. This represents a missed opportunity for many, and a golden opportunity for the few B2B marketers willing to explore how to make their content both informative and, more importantly, emotionally compelling.
The Next Steps
It’s not too late for your organization to adopt an evocative approach. For large enterprises, this will be easier, as larger organizations have more room to experiment with messaging. Whether producing a series of videos about how industry users have been able to shorten their workdays and spend more time with family (emphasis on the family!) by using your product, or changing the website’s look and feel to evoke feelings of urgency or even inspiration, this is an area where experimentation is key to success.
Smaller organizations might find it more challenging to adopt an evocative marketing approach. Any effort put toward this end, however, will pay off. The easiest way to accomplish this is to focus on customer stories, with a special emphasis on stories that illustrate the transformative promise of your products or services. If you are still in the early stages, a focus on the founders and the company’s driving mission can serve the same end.
We live in an oversaturated world. To stand out from the crowd, you need more than a differentiating message or product, as important as those are. What you need is a differentiating feeling. And if you can get customers to feel something about your brand, you will be more likely to reap the rewards of unshakeable customer preference, loyalty and advocacy.
