Build brand awareness and loyalty without distracting your audience.
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.
Stepping into the General Store is like taking a step back in time. Glass jars full of Tootsie Rolls and Swedish Fish greet you at the front door. The cracked walls are lined with photos showing the Deli as the town’s original grocery store. There’s a framed copy of the local newspaper, and the headline reads, “Men Walk on the Moon.”
My interest in the news used to be like most — casual. Since 2020, though, I’ve spent an abnormal amount of time obsessing over it. A lot happened that year, if you recall. One article per topic used to suffice. Now, the News app on my iPhone follows any article I click with a delightful notification about another. The algorithm picks up my interests quickly. However, it seems as if the perspectives and opinions of each article I read get more polarizing, controversial, and perhaps even darker.1 Another News notification? Click.
With the 2024 election on the horizon, I decided to give up the News app. But, with the satisfying vibration of each breaking story, I knew I couldn’t do this alone. I researched multiple screen time-saving apps, and decided on Opal — it promised 5 years of my life back, free from distractions. I created an account and decided which apps were the most detrimental to my focus. That was Monday night.
Breaking: The Urge is Real
Tuesday morning, I immediately reached for my phone. The apps I habitually open were blocked but, instead of checking other apps, I rolled out of bed and started my day. Throughout the week, I continued to click my phone’s notifications, only to be denied access to them by Opal. After each blocked attempt, I simply moved on to the things that needed to be accomplished. On Wednesday, I headed to the office 15 minutes earlier than usual. On Thursday, I arrived 25 minutes early! Opal awarded me with a new gemstone and let me know that I had saved enough time to watch 17 episodes of Friends. How nice, I thought.
This Just In: Data Doesn’t Lie
The Opal app was instrumental in preventing the urge to read the News, but does not provide free data. Luckily, Apple’s Screen Time app provides loads of interesting factoids. I learned that from Monday evening through Saturday, I picked up my phone 383 times! (91 pickups for Text Messages alone.) The number of notifications received during that time is also revealing — almost 150 from each of my email accounts. The biggest culprit? 263 text message notifications over 5 days. That’s much higher than I would have expected, and easily the largest source of my daily distractions.
News to Me
I didn’t look at the News app once, but I was able to ignore 173 notifications from it. I received almost as many notifications from News as I did from both my personal and professional email accounts combined. No wonder I’ve become so obsessed with the news. But the best news? Even though the number of notifications received went up each day, my daily screen time went down through Thursday. Just being more mindful about our time, I’ve concluded, seems to enable us to focus on more important things.2
It's Sunday, and I’m back at the General Store with my family. My wife and I are splitting the veggie wrap, my son Owen is enjoying his everything bagel — toasted with cream cheese — and Samantha, my daughter, is sipping her orange juice. I can focus on these little details, because I'm not staring at my screen. I also happen to notice the stack of newspapers by the coffee, and pick up a copy. I catch up on a week’s worth of news after 20 minutes, and haven't looked at the News app once. That’s one small step for man, I think to myself, one giant step for mankind.
Give a Creative Director a creative brief and make yourself a bucket of popcorn. Sit back and watch as he or she questions the objectives, pushes back against the target audience, and argues over the communication points and product benefits. The brief is all wrong, the Creative Director will explain. It needs to be reworked. The Strategist will have to dig deeper to find a more insightful approach.
Give that same creative brief to a Designer and expect ten solutions by morning. It’s the inquisitive nature of designers that drive them to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Like an artist, they just want to make creative stuff. Like an engineer, they want to do it in a way that solves real-world challenges. Yet, they’re rarely given the credit they deserve.
In Stolen Focus, author Johann Hari discusses the infinite scroll, an internet browser feature that automatically loads more content when a user reaches the bottom of the page. It was designed by Aza Raskin, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, who admits that the feature likely contributed to smartphone addiction. (Hari, 2024, p. 120) We spend more hours on the internet when we aren’t given the time to pause, reflect, and make a conscious decision about continuing to scroll. But I can’t help but imagine the creative brief that led Raskin to his solution: create more engagement. To that extent, didn’t Raskin solve the problem brilliantly?
Raskin’s Center for Humane Technology offers a course that’s focused on shifting the “foundational paradigms underlying technology creation.” It’s a fantastic course, filled with astonishing data about the harms of persuasive technology. My favorite diagram is inspired by Donella Meadows’ “12 Leverage Points to Intervene in a System.” There are seven forces to balance the attention degradation cause my social media, in ascending order. At the bottom of the list? Design Changes. The course calls out that design “changes may be small, but they start the conversation.” Um, thanks for the recognition? Significant changes can’t happen until the design issues are solved, for crying out loud! This is a perfect opportunity to praise and celebrate the work that designers do. Once again, they are relegated to the bottom of the ladder.
In Ayn Rand’s seminal 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, she imagined an American dystopia where businesses are overrun by government rules and regulation. Instead of continuing to fight and argue with politicians, the self-made leaders of the world — Atlas, as Rand envisioned them — simply retreat to a secret resort. They strike. It’s a wonderful analogy for today’s designers. Without them, who would solve all the problems with persuasive technology? Who’s going to figure out the solution to the infinite scroll? It will be a designer, of course. At least until they all decide to shrug.
In 2005, I worked in the basement of the Byrd Library at Syracuse University. My job was to help students load the microfilm machines. Microfilm was already outdated, but I enjoyed the physical nature of thumbing through the card catalog, jotting down the call number, and locating the tiny white box among aisles of stocked shelves. I’d align the sprocket holes of the film, flip the light switch on, and spin the reel to the first article.
“All set,” I would say, “just turn the knob to the right if you want to fast-forward.” I took pride in mastering this antiquated database, and gladly accepted $5.15 an hour for my services.
If the technology wasn’t enough of a symbolic divide, a long row of black filing cabinets separated the microfilm machines from the Apple computers at the other end of the Media Center. It was always busier on that side, and I was curious about what people accomplished with the new technology. I remember thinking, could I learn Photoshop CS? I gave myself 6 months to figure it out — At the time, it was a goal that seemed just out of reach.
Fast-forward 20 years and a similar, though metaphorical, divide exists in my family today. Every weekend, we go to my in-laws’ house for a traditional Sunday dinner. There are two grandparents, six parents, and seven cousins between the ages of six and fifteen. On one side of the divide are those of us that sit around the dinner table chatting. My wife’s mother, whom we affectionately refer to as “Mimi,” and I discuss books that we’ve recently read. Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, is a recent example. Mimi, whose Italian father served in WWII, was interested in the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Looking around the room, I quietly mentioned his discovery that staring at screens provides the lowest amount of “Flow.”1Our discussions are always deep and insightful. I usually learn something new.
It’s ironic, of course, that as one group engages in conversation, the other stares intently at their mobile devices. Sometimes inches away on the same couch, the adults in this group endlessly scroll through Facebook and Instagram, or swipe through the latest viral TikTok videos. The kids will play video games, text, or Facetime their friends. I can’t help but wonder, which group is missing out? Should I learn to communicate with emojis?
At Syracuse, I was initially reluctant to learn about the tools on the digital side of the basement. Eventually I did, though, and that educational leap began my journey to becoming a graphic designer. Should I cross a similar bridge today? After noticing the division within my own family — and equipped with a rudimentary understanding of the technology that causes distraction — I recently conducted an experiment. I revealed to one of the family members that I had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. I may have had it for years, I exclaimed. Looking up from her phone blankly, but not directly at me, my subject simply replied, “That sucks.” Her eyes darted across the room, then straight back to her screen. (Perhaps she didn’t read any fiction novels in her youth, I concluded.) Having received what I deemed the incorrect amount of empathy, I pulled the iPhone out of my back pocket and began scrolling. I needed to check how many hearts my most recent Instagram post received.
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