Every morning we get up at 05:30 and walk our little dog Ella. Now there’s nothing special about Ella or the fact that we get up and walk her so early. But what does happen at certain times of the year is that the day starts to break and the birds respond with the dawn chorus.
Now when the birds begin to sing Ella starts to pay attention, but the interesting thing is that not all the birds grab Ella’s attention. The Crows and Magpies can chatter away, as can the Sparrows, Chaffinches and Robins, they have absolutely no effect whatsoever on Ella. However as soon as the Blackbirds begin to chirp away Ella picks up and starts to pay attention. The more they sing the harder Ella pulls on the lead, if she were off the lead she’d be chasing them all over the place. Ella simply can’t resist the call of the Blackbird. It’s fascinating to watch.
So what’s the link to marketing you ask. Well most marketing messages get the same reaction as the Crows and Magpies callings do with Ella, absolutely nothing, nanda, not a thing. The intended recipient pays no attention whatsoever, it falls on deaf ears. This is because it meant nothing to them, it didn’t even make it through the marketing clutter that we’re all subjected to on a hourly basis.
You see our brains are incredibly complex. We can sift through billions of bits of data at any given time but to do so requires hard work and the brain is quite lazy, so to help with all of this data the brain has something called ‘The Reticular Activating System’. The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is a bundle of nerves at our brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so the important stuff gets through. The reticular activator is the part of your brain that’s on the lookout 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even when you’re asleep. It constantly scans the environment looking for things that fall into any of these three categories:-
- Things that are familiar,
- Things that are unusual and,
- Things that are problematic.
When the brain detects any of these three categories on a subconscious level, it sends a message over to the conscious side of the brain and says, “Hey! Wake up! There’s something here you need to pay attention to.” whatever those familiar, unusual, or problematic things are… we call them activators.
The RAS is the reason you learn a new word and then start hearing it everywhere. It’s why you can tune out a crowd full of talking people, yet immediately snap to attention when someone says your name or something that at least sounds like it.
Your RAS takes all that data and creates a filter for it. It then sifts through the data and presents only the pieces that are important to you. All of this happens without you noticing, of course. The RAS programmes itself to work in your favour without you actively doing anything. Pretty awesome, right? This is exactly what the Blackbird’s song does with Ella, it gets straight through her RAS filter and makes her pay attention, and even get thoroughly excited at the sound of the Blackbird’s call.
So you need to learn to be like a Blackbird’s call to Ella. You need to resonate with your intended audience get through their RAS Filter and get them to pay attention to your marketing message. This is more difficult than it sounds.
The average person is subjected to somewhere in the region of 117,000 marketing messages every week, so to get yours to stand out takes some doing. What you need is what we call a ‘Reticular Activator’ this is something that makes your prospective customer pay attention to your message. A great example would be the ‘Meerkats’ from the ‘Compare The Market’ ads, they are cute, unusual (you don’t often see a talking Meerkat) and funny, they get you to pay attention to the Ad even if you don’t want or need insurance. If you’re using social media for example, then a great image or an eye-catching headline that arouses curiosity or provokes a reaction that gets people to pay attention would have the same effect.
This is the first step in the basic marketing equation (Interrupt, engage, educate and offer), but here’s the problem. You’ve been conditioned to believe that as long as you’ve interrupted the prospect that’s good enough. If you only interrupt the prospect, that’s only one fourth of the marketing equation you’ve got to include all four components:- interrupt, engage, educate, and offer to get the maximum results from your marketing and advertising.
The thing is that once the brain is activated, once it’s been broken out of downtime (interrupted) and into uptime alert mode, it wants to be “engaged” So it searches for additional facts and if it finds them, it’ll become engaged if not, it will quickly revert back into downtime. We call these important, relevant issues “hot buttons”:-
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- Is there anything here that’s relevant or important to me?
- Is this a hot button issue for me at this point in my life?
The problem here is that most marketing does not activate people’s ‘hot buttons. This happens in marketing and advertising all the time. Most marketing interrupts, but it doesn’t engage. Just like the Meerkats, they are funny and cute so they capture your attention; it interrupts you. But when you find out that it’s not based on anything that’s important to you, when there’s nothing relevant, nothing that solves some problem that you have, you quickly revert to downtime. Just like my little dog, you’ll calm down and realise that there is nothing in this for you.
I’ll return to this theme in another blog and cover the final two elements of the marketing equation, educate and offer at that time.
In the meantime check out my ‘Virtual Business Coaching’ offer for November. Where I’m offering a Free business planning session worth £199 for Just 5 people who sign up in November. You can find out more about that here. www.johnolivant.com/virtual-business-coaching/
Twelve intensive half-day meetings.
