The first time I saw the term attention poverty, I thought it had something to do with some NGO and its poverty alleviation efforts. I crave your indulgence as being from Africa poverty is a sensitive problem which we encounter quite often. Now I know that attention poverty can be better understood in relation to attention economics which sees human attention as a scarce commodity which is needless to say quite difficult to obtain. Attention in itself refers to the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things ( Available from: Wikipedia assessed 25 August 2011)
One of the main concerns of most marketing teams is to capture consumer attention and convert possible or non-customers into regular and loyal customers. Attention poverty creates a problem of managing information in such a way that customers and consumers are able to absolve this information easily and thus maintain their attention span. This is what marketing hopes to achieve.
In order to manage the information as best as they can under the circumstances. The marketer needs to engage the customers and hold or maintain their attention as long as is possible to retain them and achieve all possible benefits such as word of mouth advertising (such as product or service reviews).
There is a wealth of information in the world and the existence if new media means the information available is not just in abundance but also very much available to a large segment of the world’s population which is online. This wealth of information needs to be assimilated by its recipients thus creating a scarcity of attention that can consume this amount of information that is available. This scarcity is attention poverty and every organisation needs to come up with innovative ways and means of effectively ensuring information provided maintains the attention of its recipients.
Organisations are constantly faced with the challenge of attention poverty and they tend to tackle this mainly through the use of advertising campaigns which are tailored to arrest the consumers attention immediately and hopefully keep it for as long as possible at least up until the next campaign comes along. Recently, an advert that caught my attention was one for the axe body spray which showed angels falling (literally) to the scent of the new Axe deodorant (Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtjfaCKRNFo assessed 25 August 2011). Now this is a male product and ideally I won’t even notice it not to talk of paying it any attention or remembering it but the advertisement was successful in capturing my attention and what this means is if for any reason at all I need to buy a deodorant for a male or recommend it to one, I’ll probably go with this cause it’ll would most likely be the most memorable.
Attention poverty therefore results in a need for significant advertisements and interaction between the organisation and/or marketer and the customer or consumer. If this is not addressed it might lead to a loss in market share possibilities.
I like to think of customers in terms of children it’s difficult to capture their attention and even more so to hold their attention long enough. A company which manages its attention poverty is likely to have excellent marketing results
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