Avoid wallpaper at all costs

Bartlett’s eleventh law highlights the dangers of being too bland. Building on his previous law, Bartlett warns of the mundane, that which leaves you cold and fails to draw an emotional response.

Habituation is a neurological device that helps us to focus on what matters, while tuning out things our brain doesn’t need to focus on. How many of you have walked, perhaps even driven, to work and not remembered the journey?

You have likely been busy thinking about other things, solving other issues, or planning for a busy day ahead, and somehow the details of how you got to your destination are just missing. Similarly, Bartlett suggests that repeating a word too many times has the same effect; it becomes simply a sound and the word itself loses its meaning to you.

The wallpaper effect was something Bartlett had first had experience of. Noticing patterns within his podcast stats, he soon realised that the episodes for which there was an image with a neutral face (i.e. wallpaper) were getting significantly less clicks than those which displayed an animated face.

But, while boring wallpaper images and phrases rate poorly for clicks and grabbing your audience's attention, Bartlett also warns that over-use of less mundane things can also become wallpaper as the audience becomes desensitised to it.

The mere exposure effect highlights the idea of an optimal level of exposure: something has been seen enough that it’s recognised, but not so much that it is forgettable. In sales, particularly in outreach, there is a huge opportunity to capitalise on here.

By using unexpected, unsaturated messaging, you are far more likely to be successful in catching your audience’s attention and holding it. You need to evoke an emotional response in your audience for them to remember you, to be intrigued by you, and for them to want to interact with you.

“Great marketing is uncomfortable. It springs a dormant brain into a neurological frenzy.”

Rather like marmite, whether your audience loves or hates what you’re doing and saying, it doesn’t necessarily matter. As long as you are evoking an emotion in them, one way or another, you can beat your audience’s habituation filter and become memorable in the process.