About this Research Topic
Why does attention matter? Attention has been the subject of rigorous research in marketing communication and other related disciplines, such as psychology and neuroscience. In a broadest sense, marketing communication is essentially all about capturing and engaging the audience's attention. Proponents of visual marketing and attention marketing dedicate themselves to understanding consumers’ attention, how attention influences consumer behavior, and how marketing stimuli win the competition for attention.
The urge to investigate attention has been spurred by the fact that, despite the floods of information that consume human attention, the latter is finite in nature, and has thus been considered an ultimately scarce resource in modern markets. The increasing recognition of the value of attention has led to the emergence of the concept of ‘attention economy.’ In advertising, attention metrics have become an important tool for brands to measure the success of their campaigns more effectively. As a consequence, attention metrics have gained popularity for modeling consumer attention to media placements and creatives. Methods to investigate attention have also grown from traditional self-reports to the deployment of hardware and software for eye movement, facial and biometric recording, and virtual reality technologies.
Despite decades of research on attention, the opportunities for future research on such a crucial cognitive mechanism are plentiful. To date, there is fragmented knowledge about what attention is, the way it operates, its role, effects, and how to best measure it. For example, the most frequently cited definition of attention comes from a psychologist, William James, who lived in the 1800s, and has not been updated to match our current knowledge about human attention. Furthermore, a seminal article in marketing has highlighted that there is an increasing gap between a consumer’s actual attention to a set of stimuli in real life versus the experimental scenario crafted by consumer psychologists. Among other things, this is because experimental protocols and artificially created stimuli rarely seem to accurately reproduce the level of distractions that consumers face in real life. Consequently, research in this area runs the risk of being irrelevant in addressing the real problem of consumer attention.
Studies are also beginning to show that, far from merely generating consumer awareness, attention also plays a variety of roles vis-à-vis cognitive, affective, and choice processes. Yet how and under what conditions attention influences such processes remains unclear, as experimental results are likely to vary according to individual and contextual factors. More recently, a new stream of research has questioned the effectiveness of seeking consumers’ undivided attention, a paradigm known as ‘high attention processing,’ focusing, instead, on the presentation of non-invasive content, a paradigm known as ‘low attention processing.’ Although this type of research has the potential to provide a solution to the growing problem of consumer inattention to marketing communication, it is also at an infant stage, and much more work is needed to produce actually useful insights.
Given the current state of play, work on attention marketing might benefit from different, but complementary lines of research:
(I) empirical research, in the form of experimentation, analysis of secondary data, and evidence review or meta-analysis
(II) the creation of a theoretical/conceptual framework describing the different types of attention and outlining the relationship(s) between attention, cognition, affect, and action/behavior; or identifying the factors affecting attention
(III) theory-development research addressing the weaknesses of the current theories of attention, expanding such theories, or developing new ones.
Themes to be addressed in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to, the following:
• how to measure consumer attention in marketing communication
• the relationship between attention and advertising effectiveness
• the impact of attention on marketing communication effectiveness in different contexts (e.g., in store, outdoor, and product display)
• factors affecting attention (exogenous or endogenous)
• current perspectives on the relationship between consciousness and attention
• models of attentional processing in different contexts
• attention and distractions (multitasking, multiple stimuli, and attention switching)
• attention and memory (long-term, short-term, episodic, etc.)
• attention and emotion
• attention and behavior
• low attention processing of advertising.
The urge to investigate attention has been spurred by the fact that, despite the floods of information that consume human attention, the latter is finite in nature, and has thus been considered an ultimately scarce resource in modern markets. The increasing recognition of the value of attention has led to the emergence of the concept of ‘attention economy.’ In advertising, attention metrics have become an important tool for brands to measure the success of their campaigns more effectively. As a consequence, attention metrics have gained popularity for modeling consumer attention to media placements and creatives. Methods to investigate attention have also grown from traditional self-reports to the deployment of hardware and software for eye movement, facial and biometric recording, and virtual reality technologies.
Despite decades of research on attention, the opportunities for future research on such a crucial cognitive mechanism are plentiful. To date, there is fragmented knowledge about what attention is, the way it operates, its role, effects, and how to best measure it. For example, the most frequently cited definition of attention comes from a psychologist, William James, who lived in the 1800s, and has not been updated to match our current knowledge about human attention. Furthermore, a seminal article in marketing has highlighted that there is an increasing gap between a consumer’s actual attention to a set of stimuli in real life versus the experimental scenario crafted by consumer psychologists. Among other things, this is because experimental protocols and artificially created stimuli rarely seem to accurately reproduce the level of distractions that consumers face in real life. Consequently, research in this area runs the risk of being irrelevant in addressing the real problem of consumer attention.
Studies are also beginning to show that, far from merely generating consumer awareness, attention also plays a variety of roles vis-à-vis cognitive, affective, and choice processes. Yet how and under what conditions attention influences such processes remains unclear, as experimental results are likely to vary according to individual and contextual factors. More recently, a new stream of research has questioned the effectiveness of seeking consumers’ undivided attention, a paradigm known as ‘high attention processing,’ focusing, instead, on the presentation of non-invasive content, a paradigm known as ‘low attention processing.’ Although this type of research has the potential to provide a solution to the growing problem of consumer inattention to marketing communication, it is also at an infant stage, and much more work is needed to produce actually useful insights.
Given the current state of play, work on attention marketing might benefit from different, but complementary lines of research:
(I) empirical research, in the form of experimentation, analysis of secondary data, and evidence review or meta-analysis
(II) the creation of a theoretical/conceptual framework describing the different types of attention and outlining the relationship(s) between attention, cognition, affect, and action/behavior; or identifying the factors affecting attention
(III) theory-development research addressing the weaknesses of the current theories of attention, expanding such theories, or developing new ones.
Themes to be addressed in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to, the following:
• how to measure consumer attention in marketing communication
• the relationship between attention and advertising effectiveness
• the impact of attention on marketing communication effectiveness in different contexts (e.g., in store, outdoor, and product display)
• factors affecting attention (exogenous or endogenous)
• current perspectives on the relationship between consciousness and attention
• models of attentional processing in different contexts
• attention and distractions (multitasking, multiple stimuli, and attention switching)
• attention and memory (long-term, short-term, episodic, etc.)
• attention and emotion
• attention and behavior
• low attention processing of advertising.
Keywords: attention, visual attention, selective attention, attention measurement, attention metrics and analytics, attention-based marketing, attention to advertising, eye-tracking, mere exposure, virtual reality, low attention processing
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