The Neuropsychology of Youth Marketing: Gating
The Brain Science Behind
Ironically, I don’t remember much from my Neuropsychology course back at University (and I didn’t become a brain surgeon).
One concept that did stick with me, however, was the concept of gating; the neurological mechanism that enables the brain to function.
The brain only attends to 5% of the information (stimuli) it receives from all available senses. You’re probably not concentrating on the sensation of the pulse in your left foot right now but not I’ve drawn attention to it, it’s on the psychological radar.
Attention is your biggest cost.
Gating is the neurological tool for blocking out information such as pain, sensation etc to avoid overload.
Take a look at this attention awareness test and consider its implications for youth marketing:
Test Your Awareness: Do The Test
Gating is the crux of youth marketing success.
Ivory Tower Check
Believe it or not, youth don’t wake up in the morning thinking about our brands.
The vast majority of marketing believes in the assumption that how marketers and youth interact is somehow different from the basic function of how young brains think - i.e. that being “good” is simply enough to win over their attention.
Being “good” died out when every product out there became “good”. Levi’s was a “good” pair of jeans, but it failed to halt its decline from #1 to #7 in world jean sales over 20 years.
Winning Attention is About Relevance
Youth gate good products. They don’t listen. So how do you get their attention?
Be relevant. Gating is about blocking out the 95% of products and brand messages that are irrelevant. Do youth really respond to communications that cite a brand as the “leading provider of X”?
It’s the mental equivalent of GMails “Report Spam”. Every time you send an irrelevant message to young consumers you risk being blocked. That’s why less is more and relevance paramount.
So the morale of gating is: your youth brand may be a moonwalking bear but unless you’re the team in white, you may as well forget it.
Technorati Tags: psychology, neuropsychology, youth marketing, gating, attention, awareness, psychology experiment, mobile behavior
Attention is by far your biggest cost. I love the series of commercial that the city of london did to tackle the cyclist issue.
Keep up the posts on psychology, I love ‘em.