Grabbing and holding attention is what it is all about. So how do we design items that do this?
In my last piece I reduced all advertising to three processes
- Think how we are going to be informative, interesting and unusual
- Think how we are grabbing and holding attention
- Consider what we have got, and then work out the design and copywriting in terms of what the psychology of perception says.
I got to this conclusion after travelling through a series of articles which deal with the ways in which it is possible to get double or treble the response rate from each advert which you place via email, the post and on web sites. (If you want to go back and read the series from the start, just click here)
I suggested also that the common sense notion that we need to be shouting out our company name and our product name so people remember it doesn’t work. Common sense is wrong. For all the evidence clearly shows that we need to be informative, interesting and unusual.
We need to jerk the readers or viewers out of their current state and get them to think about what we want them to think about.
So the question is, what does this imply for the design and copywriting?
The first point to make is that the design and copywriting doesn’t come first. You can’t just write copy or come up with a design that looks nice before you have decided how the promotion is going to be unusual and different from all the thousands of other promotions that people see.
And we must also always remember that “looking good” isn’t enough. It might look good to you when you look at the resultant web page, email or brochure – but you are focussed on it, because it is your product.
What we actually have to do is use the design to grab the reader who is not very interested by the throat, and then hold on. Our question therefore becomes:
What sort of design grabs the reader’s attention so dramatically that he or she can’t stop looking?
Now, of course, we don’t know the state of mind of the reader. If the reader is already interested, then quite often simple illustrations will work. So if you are thinking about buying a sofa or a set of new office furniture, or a set of chemistry books to use with your A level class, you might well focus on the picture of a sofa, office desk or a page from the book.
But that is nowhere near enough for the person who might well buy from you, but isn’t actually thinking that way when your advert arrives. Yes, a nice picture might well get some recipients to think, “oh that look’s nice” or “oh that looks interesting”, but still many other potential customers will be lost along the way.
Instead, what you need to do is consider your sale from the point of view of the psychology of perception.
Now a fundamental finding of the psychology of perception is that it is much easier to grab that attention of the passing individual with a phrase or slogan than it is with a picture. Also we know that it requires a considerable amount of brainpower to switch between looking at a picture and reading text. The partially interested reader can get lost at this stage.
The problem is that lots and lots of firms have tried to find phrases or slogans, and the passing reader is inundated with phrases or slogans. So much so that they are now ignored.
Which brings us to a real problem. Pictures take far more brain power to decipher than words, and so although a picture can work where the individual gives lots of attention to the page, when we think of the casual recipient, he/she won’t be bothered.
But phrases and slogans have been done to death, and so most are also ignored. Consider what you might do if you are faced with “Simply the best”, for example. You’ve seen and heard it so often, it stops having any arresting qualities. It is a bit like “Often copied, never bettered”, and “20% discount!” They don’t work any more.
The same is true with pictures. Stock pictures just don’t work because they have been seen.
Now if you really can create a picture that goes way beyond being nice, attractive and interesting, and is genuinely arresting, so much so that it makes everyone who looks at it drop everything and stare open mouthed, then great. Use that picture.
But a regular picture won’t work. And the same is true of a headline or a phrase. Everyday won’t do.
Our approach is often to create unusual phrases and headlines to grab attention because we find these a lot more successful and a lot less expensive than the creation of unusual pictures and designs.
Further, because no one can be utterly certain that an advert will work first time around, we often need to experiment. If that experimentation means finding different phrases or words, then it is not too expensive. If it means taking lots of different pictures, that can send the costs up dramatically.
So we will work with phrases such as “a word is worth 10,000 pictures”. But, of course, if you have the budget to create a range of unusual pictures that really do gain attention, then you can approach the design issue that way.
However, if you choose the less costly way of grabbing attention through words, that doesn’t mean that you don’t use pictures at all. All we have been discussing here is the first point of grabbing attention. I’ll move on to the way the design can take the reader towards the sale in the next article.
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This is one of three regular blogs on advertising and marketing produced by Hamilton House. If you would like to know more about what Hamilton House does please do have a meander around our web site or call us on 01536 399 000. If you want to subscribe free of charge to any of our newsletters there are details here.
And do remember: the unknown will always be boundless.
Tony Attwood
Tony@hamilton-house.com