Marketing needs to catch up with neuroscience interview with Dr. Nikolaos Dimitriadis

Marketing needs to catch up with neuroscience

We talk about making content relevant to our audience all the time but what do we really mean? We mean grabbing attention. But grabbing attention as a concept has a load of challenges. This is where marketing needs to catch up with the science. The models we use in comms to explain human behaviour, understand it and then predict it are, as Nicos explains, outdated. In the practice of marketing, we’re using old ways of understanding behaviour and when we use those models to predict and inspire creative or content, we’re really missing a trick.

Attention!

What do we mean when we say ‘attention’? Encouraging the audience to find the meaning behind our design or creative or content is what we’re doing. And it’s a much more complicated process than we realise. For example, when we direct attention in one place, we are taking it away from something else. There’s a cost analysis to be done.

Not all attention is good attention

We’re familiar with the idea of brand reputation and the importance of protecting it but we need to go a little further. When we apply the thinking to a more granular level, we discover our metrics aren’t actually telling us very much. Whether it’s a website or social media or content, we get very excited about attention. But is it the right type of attention? Negative attention is a thing we want to avoid. Instead, we’re looking for what we call motivated attention.

Motivated attention is measured by 3 simple things:

1. Likeability
2. Engagement
3. Cognitive load, the ease to compute

And it’s far easier to apply neuroscientific approaches to marketing than you might think.

Dr Nicos gives brilliant examples, explains the theory, application and gives practical advice you can start using today.

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