• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, April 19, 2023

Are you paying attention?  Yes, I know you are -- because you’re still reading this column.

Your attention is your most valuable commodity, whether you know it or not.

I read a piece in Psychology Today about two different forms of attention and and how marketers use them (source: Matt Johnson, Ph.D.).  Endogenous refers to when you are staying within predetermined lines of attention and identifying items that fit in that line.  Exogenous refers to things that are out of context and can grab your attention away from what you were doing previously.  Both work for marketers, and both have their benefits.

Endogenous marketing tactics include product placement in a movie, or display targeting with behavioral data. The former takes advantage of an emotional situation to align a brand with that moment.  In the latter, marketers are finding people looking for something and delivering them something of relevance.

Conversely, marketers will leverage exogenous marketing for things like a 3-D billboard or diverse contextual targeting in a print ad, where they place a full two-page spread for kitten adoption in Car & Driver magazine.  These are instances where they break the rhythm of consumer attention and knock it off-course.  Whichever strategy you like, they both can work well when wielded properly.

There’s a third strategy that rests somewhere in the middle: correlative marketing.  This occurs when a brand has subconsciously injected an idea into your brain through repeat exposure so often and so subtly that it starts to guide your thinking.  It's like when you decide you want to buy a silver Ford F150, and then you start to notice just how many Ford F150 trucks there are in your area. 

A slightly better example of this is the Visa ads that show Antonelli’s Cheese Shop.  You probably know the ads.  The ad is about Visa, but it features a cheese shop based in Austin.  I recently had a friend send us a gift from Antonelli’s and they had just realized this retailer was based in Austin, and they also realized they thought of that gift because the Visa ad had pounded the idea into their brain!  It is more subtle, and it works through frequency.

Marketing is psychology, and media choices work because of psychology as well.  You build personas to understand the audience you want to speak to, but you also need to know the context for where your message will be delivered.  The message and the medium are the twin tools of a successful marketer, and you have to know if you want to borrow the emotion of the context, or create your disruption to garner the attention of the viewer you want to speak to.

How much of your marketing is endogenous in nature vs. exogenous, and what are the tools you use to take advantage of one strategy over the other?  Share in the comments and let us know what you think!  That we can all learn a little something today.