People Breaking the Law

You may have noticed the arts are sometimes handcuffed by a law of visibility.

I.e. You can create a compelling piece of art, a solid product or a killer service but if the consumer doesn’t ever notice your offering is available, your idea is toast.

I think about this because I write books. And as much as I try to write purely out of conscience, actually believing in what I write, the only way people get to interact with my convictions is if they buy my book.
In fact, publishers only want you to continue to write books if your books sell.
And this takes us back to the law of visibility. The only way people can ever buy a book, is if they first SEE it.

If you have your own thing–your art, your music, your dream–that desperately needs some space in front of the public eye, here are some observations about how visibility works, drawn from eye-tracking research.

1. Customer feedback can be unreliable. They don’t always even know what they really pay attention to.

When you ask a person “What’s the first thing you saw when you walked into that department store aisle?,” they may tell you it’s the bright red bottle of shampoo on the eye-level shelf. But that, according to the latest eye-tracking technology that records where customers’ eyes linger as they walk through stores, is likely the wrong answer.

According to Christian Simms, a marketer at Proctor and Gamble, “What consumers say and what they react to is a very different thing than what they spontaneously react to. We’re interested in what they can tell us without saying it to us.”

2. Not enough attention is paid to spontaneous reaction. It’s not enough to put up a sign in an eye-catching color. Consumers may say they notice the color when asked what stands out, but the truth is they are trained to ignore it even if they notice it. Everyone knows signs are tools of commercialism. Their spontaneous reaction is not to walk in closer, but  to ignore signs of all colors.

3. People don’t get to read the whole package. You know that clever copy you develop for the back of the book? That gorgeous artwork you commission for your project’s website? That perfect introduction you write to launch your new service via the web? They too only work if someone SEES them. Many times, research shows, people don’t get close enough to a product to read the words printed on it. The sad reality? We spend a disproportionate amount of our money on things people never get to see.

4. People sometimes notice the wrong things. They may momentarily notice the bright green can that houses your soda, but they might miss the lettering that clearly reads “diet”. The result? You miss all your diet soda consumers. They may notice your book cover, but the cover image may make them think the book is a marketplace text, when really it’s personal self-help. The result? You miss your self-help consumer.

5. People look through the lens of their memories. For example, when asked what they saw in a store cleaning aisle, customers sometimes claimed to remember things they didn’t see. They might, for instance, describe–in detail–clear spray bottles full of teal liquid with a white Windex label…even if there was no Windex in the aisle at all. They looked, but they saw hundreds of products which they interpreted using their memory. In short, they saw what they expected to see.

The same thing goes for our work. People might pass on good music because the last indie CD they bought was terrible. They might not explore your conference site because they think they’ve already been to conferences like yours and already know what they’d find.

All this research, of course, points to the right questions for finding a solution more than it points to a cut-and-dry solution itself.

What sorts of things cause people to want to interact more deeply with your product, so they can see what special value it holds apart from their previous experiences?

And how can we put more time and energy on the front end, in getting people to SEE, so they can interact with our valuable content?

I’ll go ahead and tip my predictable hat and suggest I bet it involves humans.

Most successful marketing strategies I read about these days involve people.

People wearing t-shirts.
People handing out product.
People-generated content or reviews.
People spinning signs like these guys in the video below.
People are one of the only things that can break the law of visibility.

They say a good product sells itself.

But I might add, in our commercial-saturated culture, good people have to help the product get seen before a good product can do it’s own selling.