We’ve probably all seen that basketball thing with the guy in a gorilla suit, the selective attention test it’s called. It’s one of those examples of a bit of human weirdness that’s both anecdotally kind of cool but also has massive implications for anyone whose job involves communicating with human beings. If you haven’t seen it it’s here, (sorry that I've spoiled it for you).

There’s also that brilliant Guardian article from years back about the guy who tracked all the ads he was exposed to in a single day (this fella), and after being exposed to 250 different brand messages over a 90 minute period he could recall only one of them. No doubt today’s numbers would be even worse as we are exposed to far more ads, and those ads are less compelling and memorable than those in the past.

There’s plenty more studies, observations, and research that all underscores this fundamental truth: Our brains are lazy, they filter out most of the stimulus around us so they can focus on the things that it feels are useful.

Anyone who has dabbled in psychedelics can attest to how disorientating it is when the brain turns the filters off, Aldous Huxley got it when he described LSD as opening the doors of perception - something modern day boffins have confirmed through studies that demonstrate that taking LSD partially deactivates the thalamus, which is the part of your brain that does all the filtering, think of it like a neurological spam filter.

You don’t need to deploy psychedelics to subvert neurological spam filters though, we can trick the brain into thinking information is important by evoking emotion. There’s a lot of complexity and nuance in the ways that emotion affects how we process information, for instance a little bit of stress can make us more receptive, a lot of stress will make us less.

On the whole though, emotional imagery and language will make things ‘pop out’ and be more attention grabbing and memorable, with the type of emotion seeming to shape how we then engage with that information, more negative emotions tending to produce more critical thinking, and positive emotions tending more towards simpler heuristics.

We don’t even have to bring audiences to tears or scare them witless to make something salient and memorable though, all the evidence shows that being funny, or simply using memorable rhyming language will increase message cut through, attribution, and recall. Even the much maligned jingle is going to work, (though funnily enough the lyrics seem to have near zero effect, it’s the catchiness of the tune that counts).

In marketing we’ve always known these things. In order to achieve any communications objective advertising has to first and foremost grab a consumer’s attention. We’re in the business of tricking brains into thinking that a brand and what it has to say is important. Or at least we used to be…

Here’s where I shift a bit from the academic to the polemic, I’ve laid out that there is an abundance of studies and research literature from marketing science, through psychology, through neuroscience even, attesting to this kind of basic premise that brands face an uphill battle, they need to be noticed and remembered, and for the purposes of growth, primarily by people who currently aren’t noticing or remembering the brand. In the simplest terms; in order to grow a brand, you most probably need to acquire new customers, and in order to acquire new customers you need to grab the attention of and be remembered by people who currently don’t notice or think about the brand.

The problem is that most advertising doesn’t manage to achieve this most rudimentary level of effectiveness. There’s this eye opening stat showing that 86% of advertisements people either ignore or misattribute to a different brand - it’s from Ehrenberg Bass so it is probably fairly legit, even if i can’t find their exact methodology (but they do reference it here). Regardless, it rings true to me. I know I see a lot of ads, but I only remember a few of them.

So what's the rub? This should be job number one for any communications that go out.

My hunch is that brands have forgotten that they exist to trick people into paying attention, and instead they’ve started to want to actually be important - which is quite different from tricking people into thinking they are for the purposes of grabbing their attention.

Unlike trickery, making brands actually important is something advertising is not particularly good at, and the irony is that trying to actually be important leaves brands less likely to get noticed, remembered, and purchased.

At the root of the problem seems to sit this irritating piece of jargon; ‘Brand Relevance’.

David Aaker coined the term Brand Relevance, in 2004, and went on to write a book on it which was published not so long ago in 2010. If you go and read Aaker’s book you’ll see that his original conception of brand relevance is remarkably different from how it gets tossed around barely two decades later.

Aaker’s model is actually quite smart, it essentially boils down to “don’t fight a differentiation battle for preference within a category consideration set, instead reposition your brand as being in a category unto itself - thus making the current competition irrelevant”. That strategy might not work for every brand out there, but if you have something unique to hang your hat on then you could do a lot worse. Apple more than anyone is testament to how this approach can be effective. Stella Artois comes to mind too, having done memorable creative work without genuine innovation to back up their ‘new category’ claims with their glassware chalices and cider cidre. So for Aaker relevance is always composed of three elements, there must be a category that exists in the minds of consumers, there must be a consumer need that the category fulfills, and the brand’s relevance is the degree to which it meets those needs.

I don’t particularly take issue with Aaker’s model though, I actually quite like it as long as it’s treated as just one particular way to skin a cat, my beef is with what brand relevance has metamorphosed into, because if you ask advertising and marketing professionals today what they think brand relevance means, they’ll likely give you a totally different interpretation.

According to this survey of 300 marketing professionals, they most associate relevance with relatability. I’ve also asked around a few of my industry pals, about 2/3rds of them gave a description along similar lines, emphasizing a kind of shared emotional or values based kinship between consumer and brand. The other 1/3rd were closer to Aaker’s conception of relevance and positioned it as being a kind of more consumer-centric way of thinking about the consideration set.

You can see this confusion play out in the methodology used to track brand relevance. There are two distinct kinds of questions that get asked depending on the survey used. The first being some riff on Aaker style ‘consideration set relevance’, e.g. “How relevant do you find [Brand] in meeting your needs and preferences?”, and the second being an approximation of the more contemporary ‘relatability relevance’ e.g. “[Brand] is a brand for people like me”.

It seems like for most of the people using the term today, brand relevance has shifted to become a sort of proxy for relatability, shared values, empathy even.

Part of the appeal here is probably egotistical, the ‘we’re not selling widgets, we’re creating deep and meaningful relationships with brands’ type of thing. Then there’s a bikeshedding effect, as marketing professionals we are anomalous outliers on the ‘amount of time spent thinking about brands’ bell curve - we think about brands much more deeply and anthropomorphize them to an extent the layperson would consider bizarre.

The last reason I can think of is the most relevant to my point here though, it’s easy to create a measurably relatable ad, it’s hard to create or even preemptively measure something attention grabbing, and therefore effective.

Think about those research questions used to measure relevance, ‘for people like me’, ‘meets my needs and preferences’. Now if you cynically wanted to pass through a research methodology for a brief that prioritized relevance then what might you do? If I were to do that I would make an ad that shows a consumer stand in character that mirrors the audience, someone they can empathize with, and have them talk about how the product serves their needs.

Now I’m sure I’ve seen plenty of ads like that, though I can’t remember what brands they were for because they were awful ads, and I suppose that’s my point really.