We often don’t see things that are clearly presented in front of us. It is sort of a blindfold you are unaware of, and it affects ALL of us.
There are a few reasons why this blindfold happens, and it is important to be aware of this when you do marketing as it affects how you need to communicate to get past this. Two keywords are REPETITION and NURTURING, which we will look at further down, but let’s first look at some of the physiological reasons for this blindfold and how these affect it.
Your brain filters out sensory impressions
The part called the thalamus in your brain is responsible for filtering out sensory impressions. This is simply because you would not be able to process everything efficiently, and compared to 10 years ago, the amount of information and impressions we get exposed to.
The effect is that you will not notice everything you are exposed to.
E.g. a message can be clearly presented in front of you, but you do not see it.
Your brain decides for you what is important and not
You also have another part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex which is working as a filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions, and memories from interfering with a task at hand.
This is done for you and is situation dependent.
This for example means that if you are busy with a task, in a specific emotional state etc, this will affect how receptive you are to information in that moment.
E.g. the message in the example above might be taken in by your vision, so you technically see it, but your brain considers it unimportant right now.
Note that this consideration done by the prefrontal cortex is not something that you automatically control (even though you can train yourself).
So the brain filters out a lot of stuff without us even being aware of it which is what I am referring to as the unconscious blindfold. This means that just because you are placing communication in front of your potential customers, it does not mean that they actually see it. This is why repetition and continuous contact is super important when communicating with potential customers, and an important part of converting clicks to customers. In marketing, we call it nurturing.
