Attention! We Want Your Interest!

Creating ferly-level affinity and demand for your consumer products in direct congress with halo marketing communication initiatives is as important to your success as crafting the speeds and feeds of that product through R&D efforts. Product marketing chores are commonly known as building perception and awareness designed to create competitive preference, and profitable pull to—and at—the last three feet of the sale.

And yes, of course, social networking closely mirrored to company-commanded social engineering is yet another determined process to alert, inform and engage consumers to lean-in hard towards your differentiated brand and competitive product arsenal. Product and marketing investments—in any form, any format, any medium—must effectively and profitably gain valued consumers’ attention, interest, conviction, desire and their most immediate purchasing action.

William James (1842–1910) is often referred to as the father of American psychology.

Advertising and marketing is all about engaging and targeting in the language of relevant and impactful consumer psychology. As you may know, James was an original thinker regarding the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. James suggested interest and its close relative attention are major components of the epistemology and metaphysics that seep into our minds and considerations. A thing, a product, James states in “The Stream of Thought,” is a group of messages “which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us … whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real and important.”

The reality of his words is the defining power, truth and fiduciary value of CRM (Customer Relationship Management, which I purposefully re-title “Consumers Really Matter”). Well-oiled and matured CRM data mining and marketing can best stimulate consumer one-to-one relevance, one-to-one attention, and interest designed to lead to purchase preference.

We know, based upon James’ writing, that we mentally and physically repel what we are not interested in, are not familiar with and/or are not experienced in. Based on this mental construct, we, as consumers, each become more specialized. And frankly, that is what we all want. That is how we order and run our lives through relevant specialization: through the dignity of knowledge we care about most. If you personally notice a TV commercial—let’s say, for Brand X, and it is directly relevant to your needs, it will “jump off the screen” at you. If it is not a topic you’re interested in, you ignore the message; it instantly fades away. The net, information and messaging differentiates consumers, and sets the stage for the smartest advertisers to core down and heavily upon their best, most interested buyers who deliver fast attention, affinity, sales and lifetime brand value.

The sagacity of product differentiation in concert with consumer specialization stimulates greater need, desire and demand for immediate purchase—in essence, creating a “wow-magnet” to your brand and product intentions. In retrospect, the undifferentiated consumer, the undifferentiated product brand and the undifferentiated TV commercial all ride sadly and wobbly on a train traveling to the largest museum of failed products, failed brands. Excite, delight and invite active, specialized buyers to your most profitable, efficient and differentiated products, and they will, in turn, invite your brand and products into their home, business, social and mobile lives.

To build sustainable market advantage, to garner consumers’ attention and interest one product personality at a time, ensure the following companywide initiatives are aggressively created and adopted:

1. Build a company-accessible “wow-creativity” war room to formulate energizing product cosmetics, exciting packaging and especially “wow-communications” for social, editorial, in-store and paid advertising venues.

2. Cause—and effect—change through tactical weekly “attention and interest” meetings with C-level executives to present measured product and brand ROI evaluations for feedback, guidance and further investments.

3. Build a “brand and product valuation pool.” The essential weekly-feedback workshop includes: product management, advertising, communications, web team, corporate sales, finance, IT and operations.

4. Clarify, define and cleanse market opportunities through deep-dive consumer “attention and interest” feedback extracted and reacted from your CRM, SCRM and SEO targeting, feedback and measurements.

5. Define, identify, aggregate and mature united cross-company, cross-departmental performance metrics. Here you should identify what could be measured with what should be measured.

6. Create a central and distributed CRM, SCRM and SEO brand and product “dashboard” for stake-holders to review, respect, add value to, measure and spark alteration, based upon daily metric performance reviews.

I believe William James said it right: “Whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real and important.” I believe his urbane and energizing guidance with respect to garnering consumer “attention and interest” speaks to the marketing, advertising and selling language of wow-creativity. It also clearly amplifies, accents and accords the need for refulgent creativity across product, packaging and brand communication assets.

Williams’ quote also reminds us of our charged determination to deliver exciting and stimulating creative communications to the right audience with the right advantaged message with fluidity, consistency and frequency measured through our formidable CRM, SCRM and SEO dashboards. Seems the art of being wise, the art of creating product attention and interest—with all due respect to Mr. James—also emphatically implies “knowing what not

to overlook.” n