Loading I live fairly close to an interstate. Just about once a week there is either a fender bender, or someone who is pulled over for speeding. Now the worst part is that all of the traffic goes to a crawl and everyone slows down to gawk at the poor people who were in a minor accident, or the poor person who happened to be caught speeding.
Traffic backs up and then as soon as everyone gets past the accident or scenery everyone starts driving quickly again.
What lesson can we learn here?
People are physically and genetically wired to notice these types of things. Your brain is designed to notice DANGER or FEAR because if not in the past a dinosaur, tiger, dragon, or wolf would have eaten you for lunch. (Okay, so dragon’s didn’t eat people, they just burned them).
But here is the point. Everyone WANTS to look. Everyone NEEDS to look. It drives people crazy if they can’t see “what is happening.”
You want another example?
A few weeks ago at night in my neighborhood there some firetrucks, a police car, and an ambulance that rush through it. It is 10pm at night, and I only noticed due to the red flashing lights (no sirens on). It is really cold out, and once again it is fairly late. But out pop people out of their house to walk down the street and investigate the situation. They want to know “what is going on.”
Let me say that again. A cold night, late at night, people get out of their warm, comfy house, to find out what is going on.
So what is the lesson here. Well, first, we are programmed to notice certain things. Curiosity, danger, fear, excitement, etc. whatever word you want to describe it we’ve all been in that situation to where we desperately wanted to know someone or be included. This is, coincidentally enough, similar to how cults manipulate people but that is another post. The fact is this. You have got to get people’s attention if you want your marketing to effective.
But then you must engage them. Next time you watch a TV commercial notice how effective the first few seconds are with an animal talking, or singing, but then how it falls apart because it doesn’t engage you or explain why this information is valuable to you. It is tricky to do this and of course there are exceptions when you watch the whole commercial because it is funny, but most of the time the commercial falls apart.
So what do you need to do?
First, capture attention, and then engage your target audience onto the next step. Good copywriter can do this. Think of a greased slide. The idea is to build a natural progression from one thing to the next thing so it is a smooooooth transition.
So next time you’re on the roads and see someone being pulled over or a fender bender remember this scenario. You WANT to watch, because you see those red flashing lights. And notice how everyone else is gawking.
-Matt
