Are You Buying or Renting Spaces in People’s Minds?

If you want to influence your target audience, you need to get their attention.

Remember that the attention spans are shrinking. So once you’ve their attention, you need to focus on keeping and nurturing that attention.

Mind share refers to consumer awareness. People usually reserve a limited amount of space in their minds for any given product or service category — they will only remember so many brands related to a given offering. If you can create really strong mind share you might even be able to achieve TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness) which occurs when increasing percentages of our target audience automatically thinks of your product, service or company when asked for a band in that category.

For example, asking any audience around the world to name a soft-drink will almost certainly bring up Coke as a response. It may also bring up Pepsi, Sprite, 7-Up and others, but you can be quite sure that Coke will always be mentioned. Coke has TOMA and dominance in the soft-drink market.

Neither mind share nor TOMA are possible if you can’t find a way to become memorable — even if you can get people’s attention.

There are two important principles to achieve this:

1) Trigger their emotions

2) Using storytelling

By eliciting emotions, using compelling storytelling, you can delivery powerful, engaging content that will be memorable and actionable.

20 years ago you could gain main share through brute force — bombarding people with repetitive impressions and exposures to our brand — you now have to be significantly more strategic.

The great news is that for all the noise and distraction in our world today, these principles are rarely used effectively and can give you a clear and distinctive advantage in the market.

In order to influence people today, the following steps are key:

1. You have to get their attention by speaking about what they want to hear.
2. You can keep their attention by using the primary programming language of the brain: stories.
3. You can get them to remember you and your message by evoking powerful emotions through compelling stories.
4. You can influence them through effective storytelling.

By doing these things, you’ll be using the power of the Stage Effect to create an unfair advantage.