Attention to Intention: What makes a brand move from the shelf to the cart?

Rory Sutherland said “The way you direct your attention affects what you deem to be important. You cannot control what you feel is important but can control where you direct your attention. Thereby hack yourself into changing your priorities and the things that matter to you.” This quote absolutely makes sense but the only problem here: Are we capable enough of directing our attention? Since we are not, marketers take advantage of us and direct our attention.

Imagine walking with a cart through the aisle between the shelf loaded with countless brands in a departmental store. Most of the times we do not carry a list of the brands that we want to buy. We have few brands and product in our mind but have you ever really wondered what influences our choices? There are several factors which influence the shopping behavior of a customer. This article only covers the role of visual saliency bias in effecting the shopping behavior.

Our decisions and choices are not always rational. We often deviate from reason and get influenced by the biases. No matter how intelligent, we are not immune from these biases. We often use heuristics (short cuts) to take faster decisions. There are few heuristics like availability heuristic, affect heuristic, anchoring, framing etc. which affect our behavior. But in this article, we will discuss one of the most talked about topics in marketing and advertising, attention and the bias related to it that is visual saliency bias.

Attention

Customers are bombarded by stimuli from all directions. Each of the stimuli is vying for the customers attention. In departmental store various brands are competing, on television various ads are competing for the attention. And it is getting increasingly difficult for the marketers to attract the attention towards their ad, brand, package etc. So, how do customers decide where to look and how does marketer influence this attention?

Pieters and Wedel (2004) introduced two determinants (found in psychology and neuroscience) of attention: (1) bottom-up and (2) top-down attention.

Top-down is also known as active attention and bottom-up attention is also known as passive attention. You can also call this passive attention 'distractions'.

Top-down attention is consciously driven goal-oriented attention. For example, someone visiting a store to buy an item must intentionally allocate attention resource towards that item. A student trying to focus on the class lecture is an example of top-down attention. Since this type of attention must be willfully applied, it is difficult to maintain for a long time.

Bottom-up attention is influenced by colors, contours, contrasts, luminosity, movements, and textures of what is around us. It is automatic, unconscious and happens at a rapid speed, faster than our ability to process information. This happens so fast that we are not yet aware of what we are looking at. The reason for existence of bottom-up attention is to ensure the survival, reproduction and to avoid any potential threat.

A marketer is more interested in the bottom-up attention. TV is a low involvement medium; advertisement is a distraction and in retail he wants people to find his brand apart from the brand that the customer already has in his mind.

What is Visual Saliency?

Visual Saliency is a phenomenon according to which the people are drawn to things that are different to their surroundings. Our brain is 2% of bodyweight but consumes almost 20 to 25% of our energy. So, it wants to save the energy. Our brain uses a systematic method to determine the objects of interest or in other words, ‘salient objects.’ and these objects attract our attention even if the individual did not want to attend to these objects.

Apart from the factors like color, brightness and contrast mentioned above even top-down attention will influence the bottom-up attention. If we are looking for a can of Coca-Cola, we will become sensitive to the red color. Also, our top-down processes set expectations for the kinds of things we anticipate observing in our environment. An object can become noticeable if it appears out of place simply because we were not expecting to notice it. For example, a vodka in the section of rum will be noticed quickly.

But sometimes top-down processing is so powerful that it may lead to attentional blindness. People missed a gorilla in a match, when they were asked to calculate the number of times the ball was passed. Sometimes when we are looking for something of a particular shape, size, or color we suppress otherwise salient objects.

Can you imagine people missing a gorilla. You can watch the video on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

The saliency will depend on the surrounding context. If a bright object is surrounded by other competitive bright objects, it might lose its saliency. Probably making the object less bright may lead to attention.

Visual Saliency Bias

More salient items (brightness, color, and contrast) are looked at longer than less salient items. And when we give more attention to something it becomes more important. Hence more chances of buying it. It is believed that visual Saliency influences choices more than preferences. This is called Visual saliency bias sometimes also known as mere selection effect a term commonly used by neuromarketers. If someone focuses their gaze on a product whilst simultaneously ignoring other products, they are subsequently more likely to choose it. The question is under what circumstances, this bias is strong. According to Milosavljiec et al. 2012, the bias is especially strong when participants' relative preferences between the two items are relatively weak, as is likely to be the case in many real-world choices where market competition generates large numbers of similarly attractive options.

Visual Saliency bias is present especially under pressured decisions such as impulse buying (Milosavljiec et al. 2012). According to Milosavljiec and colleagues, under rapid decisions, visual saliency influences choice more than the preference.

In short, these studies demonstrate that making a design more aesthetically appealing can increase its likelihood of being selected while people are making snap decisions or decisions while they are slightly disoriented.

Conclusion

What can we take from all these finding.

Before designing the package of a product visit the stores to check the surroundings where the brand will be displayed. While designing the package try to contrast it with the surrounding to gain the attention of the shoppers.

Provide customers with the WIFI and make it easy for them to engage with their phone. Under the cognitive load, attention might win over the preference.

Slow down the speed of the customers by playing softer and slow music (instrumental) to maximize the exposure. This may lead to enhanced attention and increase the chances of purchase of the salient objects.

References

Milosavljevic, M and Cerf, M (2008) First attention then intention: insights from computational neuroscience of vision, International Journal of Advertising, 27 (3), pp 381–98.

Milica Milosavljevic, Vidhya Navalpakkam , Christof Koch, Antonio Rangel, 2011 Relative visual saliency differences induce sizable bias in consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22, pp 67-74.

Drolet, A., Luce, M. F., & Simonson, I. (2009). When does choice reveal preferences? Moderators of heuristic versus goal-based choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(1), 137–147.

Janiszewski, C, Kuo, A and Tavassoli, NT (2013) The influence of selective attention and inattention to products on subsequent choice, Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (6), pp 1258–74

Simons, DJ and Chabris, CF (1999) Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, Perception, 28 (9), pp 1059–74.

Pieters, R. & Wedel, M. (2004) Attention capture and transfer in advertising: brand, pictorial, and text-size effects. Journal of Marketing, 68 (April), pp. 36–50