Attention, Please!

Build brand awareness and loyalty without distracting your audience.

The Brand Paradox
By definition, branding is a marketing tool used to promote an organization. It allows businesses to illustrate the values they stand for, and helps to differentiate them from the competition. A compelling brand creates meaningful connections with the intended audience, gains customer loyalty, and increases sales. Historically, branding made good business sense.

Today, brands rely on many new technologies to reach potential customers. Unfortunately, some leverage invasive techniques that lead to dangerous levels of engagement and decreases our ability to focus. Constant interruptions, combined with other aspects of Surveillance Capitalism, are stealing one of life’s most valuable assets — time. In this way, businesses utilize branding as a way to detract from their audience’s quality of life. It’s important to understand how we got here in order for brands to create solutions that attract customers in the future, rather than distract them.

Collaborative Action
Recently, investigative journalism has revealed that big technology companies are a primary source of increased stress and depleted attention spans. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are just a few of the culprits. To find mental health relief, many of us have take breaks from technology and social media apps. This negatively affects the brand’s reputation and bottom line, however, it also presents a unique opportunity for other businesses to create obvious differentiation and, more importantly, to use technology in a more humane and ethical way. Still, it doesn’t solve the problem at large.

We can’t expect brands to tackle the attention challenge alone. It’s time for the people who have influence over brands, namely designers, to educate and inform their clients about the harms of invasive technology, and to help develop better solutions. The examples in this paper are referenced from academic sources, as well as professional experience. As the owner of a branding studio, I’ve experienced firsthand the tribulations of working with startup organizations, non-profits, and financial technology companies that face the same marketing challenges as their much larger counterparts — how to connect with their audience in an engaging, meaningful way. By weaving personal anecdotes into sound data and industry research, I hope to shed light on ways that designers can help brands create awareness and encourage loyalty, without having to steal all of their audience’s available attention.